It's interesting how "time is the rate of change of the state of any system" really clarifies time's foundational role across scales; such an insightfull take!
The answer is that it is not entropy that makes things happen — it is things happening that make entropy. Love this. So many cool nuggets in the article Nicholas. Well explained and written!
Fantastic essay! There's something very deep about this object-interaction paradigm: in the quantum realm, three out of the four physical basic interactions actually have particles that transmit them. We can focus particularly on gluons: at the interaction level, they tie the nuclei since they overcome the repelling force of same-charged protons; at the object level, they provide a significant fraction of the mass (m=E/c2, the way Einstein initially wrote) of the nucleus.
Let's jump up to the economy: in a gold-standard economy, money is both an object and an interaction, or a carrier of interaction if you will. Once people start to study the economy, it becomes an object itself, which is what happens with information too. The map becomes part of the territory, which is essentially cybernetics.
Another example: the platform economy is replacing the free market because in the free market, information was only an interaction, or a process happening inside every economic agent, while in the platform economy, information is also an object to be gathered and studied.
Yes, exactly — the dynamics of a subordinate system become elements (objects) within new superordinate emergent systems, whether in physics, neural networks, economics or technology. Your point about the platform economy is especially timely, as it illustrates the mechanics of the ongoing shift in the nature of the global economy.
I plan to explore cybernetics in more detail in a later article in this series — the self-correcting feedback loops (both within systems and between systems and their environment) are such an important part of how complex systems evolve
Is there any explanation as to how order emerges in the first place? Or how it continues? I don't see how the current scientific method can account for this. As Stephen Weinberg's friend said to him, "Science does not explain; it merely describes."
I have no intention of speaking on behalf of other philosophers.
I will simply say this: much of modern science is built on the application of Occam’s Razor. The assertion with the fewest assumptions is that the universe exists. The opposing viewpoint is solipsism, which poses far more questions than it answers.
I also disagree with your assertion that there is no possible explanation of order in an unconscious universe; order is an emergent property of any system that possesses dynamics capable of self-assembly and reproduction (given enough time). It is not sufficient to assert that chaos is the most logical outcome when I have outlined in this piece the mechanism for the introduction of order into chaotic systems; your assertion is akin to suggesting that water can never freeze because the most logical outcome would be to remain liquid, ignoring the dynamics between water molecules and nucleation sites that begin the freezing process.
While it is true that our entire experience of reality is mediated by our senses, our senses evolved over hundreds of millions of years to accurately represent features of the physical environment — animals that failed to produce sufficiently accurate representations were outcompeted to extinction. Survival of the fittest has honed our senses over millions of generations.
In addition, your assertion that science can’t tell us anything about the environment (loosely, the extreme scientific anti-realist position) has been heavily contested over the past century, and most anti-realists now take a more moderate position. I would encourage you to read my article “What is Mathematics?”, and then read John Worrall’s 1989 paper on structural realism for a more robust grounding here.
I’m familiar with Worrall, and from what you’re writing, everything you’re saying is in regard to empirical science mathematics, not philosophy.
What science can tell us about the environment is a scientific question. What we can know about what the fundamental nature of what it is that stimulates our senses to construct what we perceive as the envrionment is not a scientific or mathematical question, but a philosophical question.
If the only views you know are solipsism and physicalism, then I see we’re talking about radically different realms of inquiry and should probably leave it at that. This implies that you don’t know anything about substance dualism, dual aspect monism, pantheism, panentheism, subjective idealism, objective idealism, Kashmir Shaivism, Neo-Confucianism, Advaita Vedanta, qualified non dualism, Shaktism, classic theism, process theology, process philosophy, just to name over a dozen views which are wholly consistent with the data of modern science yet utterly at odds with physicalism.
Ah, I now see where you're coming from. I think we've been talking past each other, so let me summarise as I understand it (partly for clarity for any future readers).
You're not really critiquing science as such, but the implicit metaphysical claim you often see associated with it, that a purely metaphysical physicalist picture can explain why order exists at all, and so you believe that the foundation of reality must be mind-like to account for this.
My position is deliberately more limited, but it also differs from your framing in one important respect.
I do think there is an explanation for why order emerges within a law-governed universe: given stable dynamics, interaction rules, and constraints, order can arise by self-organisation, persistence of stable configurations, and selection-like filtering of unstable patterns over time. This goes beyond a description, and is a mechanism-level account of how order can arise and scale.
What I am explicitly not claiming, and what I agree may be permanently beyond empirical resolution, is an explanation for the deeper question of why the universe exists at all, or why it exists with consistent properties (laws) rather than different ones, or none.
But, given that the mechanism of how order arises given a universe with stable regularities is mechanistically describable (as I tried to outline in this article), it seems to me that your position ultimately reduces to the question of "why is there a law-governed universe?", as this is more fundamental than "why does order emerge within a law-governed universe?"
For that reason, I don't think the claim that "if the foundation of the universe is unconscious, there is no possible explanation of order" follows. We may not have (and may never have) an account of why the universe has consistent laws in the first place but, conditional on stable dynamics, order does not require a mind-like foundation to be explainable.
For clarity, my own philosophical view is closer to epistemic structural realism than to a strong metaphysical physicalism. I’m not claiming we access reality “as it is in itself”; I’m claiming that the regularities we model are not arbitrary projections, but track real relational structure well enough to yield constraint and prediction.
Beyond this, I’m not committed to any particular ontology, but I do believe that some have less merit than others.
This is why I brought up Occam’s Razor and mentioned solipsism. I wasn’t trying to reduce the philosophical landscape to two options, and I certainly wasn’t presenting "physicalism vs solipsism" as a complete map of positions. Physicalism entered the thread because you raised it explicitly; when I said "physical properties" earlier, I meant "stable regularities we can model" rather than commitment to physicalism as a metaphysical doctrine (though, in retrospect, I can see why you read it that way). My point was narrower and epistemic: if we deny that we can infer anything reliable about what lies beyond mediated experience, we slide toward radical scepticism, with solipsism being the cleanest limiting case. This ends up being a complete collapse of explanatory and predictive ambition.
If, instead, we accept fallible inference (models can be wrong yet progressively improved), then cross-scale description becomes possible, and that is the core of science. In the structural realist view, science is less about “things in themselves,” and more about increasingly constrained models of stable regularities and relations.
That’s the sense in which I invoked Occam’s Razor, as a discipline of minimising unnecessary assumptions while building predictive frameworks that actually work.
This is also why I think the conversation tends to land on consciousness. For many people, especially since Descartes, consciousness feels like the exception that forces an ontological break, with mind as a different kind of substrate rather than something that could emerge from non-mental dynamics.
I am not denying that dual-aspect or non-physicalist views can be made coherent and consistent with the data. My assertion is instead: across every domain where we’ve been able to gather detailed evidence, we repeatedly find higher-level properties emerging from organised dynamics rather than requiring a second fundamental “stuff”; given that pattern, Occam’s Razor suggests consciousness is most plausibly another emergent layer. That doesn’t pretend we already have the mechanism, but it is the lowest-assumption way to preserve continuity with the rest of our explanations. By contrast, treating consciousness as non-material in principle introduces an ontological exception that, at minimum, has to earn its explanatory and predictive weight.
I don’t expect to persuade you, and that isn’t my aim here. I mainly wanted to clarify that I’m not claiming science answers ultimate metaphysical “why” questions; I’m claiming that, given a universe with stable regularities (i.e. some form of realism, and not necessarily physicalism), emergence provides a non-mystical account of how order arises and persists within it, without any requirement of fundamental intelligence or panpsychism.
I appreciate the exchange, as it has helped me clarify my own philosophical position, and I’m happy to agree to disagree at this point.
Thank you for taking the time to respond in such detail. Surprise: I agree with every point you raised. I might phrase them differently. In fact, I would agree with your point that ‘consciousness” is emergent if we substituted “mind” for “consciousness.” I attempted to do this with another substack writer (who does openly hold a physicalist view) but I couldn’t find any way to convey what this means.
Your description of science as distinct from philosophy was among the best I’ve seen in quite awhile (William James put it very simply; science is a method with which we may find more than one philosophic view compatible)
the “mind” “consciousness” distinction is from Indian philosophy, where “chitta” is mind and “Chit” is Consciousness (Tantra is a less monistic, world-denying form of this than the more well known Advaita of Shankara)
If I could try this out with you (i’m sorry this is going to be overly simplistic; i’ just came up with this version in my conversation with the physicalist philosopher a day or so ago). This is an adaptation of a very simple analogy given by Indian teacher Ramana Maharshi. I’ve added some modern updates.
Imagine you’re sitting in a movie theater with a 50 foot IMAX screen, and watching a very well made 3D movie.
The movie screen is split - on the left side, you’re watching an overview of the scientific view of the emergence and development of the cosmos, all 13.8 billion years of it.
On the right side, you’re watching a group of scientists reviewing the experiments and theories developed over the past 400 years to support their view. For now, assume they all share your view (with regard to science, not philosophy).
you’re so absorbed in this fascinating film that at some point you completely forget you’re sitting in a movie theater and find yourself (without realizing it, forgetting who you actually are) IN the movie, talking with the scientists.
As they review all the cosmological, evolutionary and neuroscientific data, confirming all you’ve written and thought about, you start to realize they have no idea they’re in a movie, and no matter what you tell them about the film itself (the film unfolding in the projector) the light that projects the film, or the screen, which one might say is “transcendent” to all they know of the universe, they think you’re talking about something WITHIN the movie - the “movie” here referring to every possible bit of empirical data that scientists have examined over 4+ centuries.
You also realize that one could say, nothing in the movie could have started or emerged without the screen/light/film; it is responsible for all the order in the movie, and the very substance of everything in the movie universe is a combination of the light and the screen.
Advaita Vedanta tells us ONLY the screen is real, and the images of light and film itself are all merely illusory phenomena to which we should pay as little attention as possible. In this version, the screen is Chit, pure Consciousness, and all we know as “mind” AND “matter” is WITHIN the movie. Within the movie, “mind” is a recent emergent and arises in dependence on a material substratum, so any idealist philosophy which knows only “mind’ as it manifests within the movie ends up being anywhere from solipsistic to incoherent.
Tantric philosophy, on the other hand, tells us that the screen (Sat-Chit, Being Consciousness) along with the moving images of light (Chit-Shakti) and the play of both together (Ananda, or Bliss) are all equally important.
Sri Aurobindo adds one fundamental distinction - the unfolding of the movie is ALSO important and perhaps the most important thing going on. After all, we don’t go to a movie theater to look at a bare screen nor do we go simply to look at random images of light. We go for the story. And what is the greatest story ever told? The extraordinary evolutionary unfolding of the cosmos.
There are many many limitations to this analogy. The most important is it is completely mechanistic (in line with Maharshi’s tendency to elevate Shankara’s almost nihilistic view of Advaita or non dualism).
A much better analogy is lucid (or fully conscious) dreams, but I think I just realized this week, for the first time in more than 25 years of presenting it, why almost nobody who hasn’t meditated extensively AND experienced lcid dreams fails to understand it. When you’re IN the dream and fully aware, it’s not just that you’re aware of the dream universe, it’s like (to use a very rough analogy) you’re aware of the dream universe, the screen of Consciousness, the Light of the Word/Logos/Infinite Intelligence AND the mechanical karmic momentum of the “film”
Thanks for your effort to explicate your view. It helped me a great deal!
Ultimately it comes down to the physical laws of the universe: energy minimisation, gravity, etc. The earliest evidence of order is the cosmic microwave background, where quarks and electrons condensed into hydrogen atoms — thus reducing the potential energy of unpaired charges. And then gravity condensed disordered hydrogen clouds into highly ordered stars.
As for why it continues once it has formed, I plan on talking about temporal stability more in the next article in this series
Yes, this is a description of what we've observed about our sensory experience, and the regularities we've abstracted from that experience which we call "laws.'
But we still have absolutely no idea how the laws arose in the first place, nor how they continue, nor why they don't change.
This is not remotely a criticism of science, which is not designed to answer such questions. But there seems to be an implicit philosophic view that a purely naturalistic/physicalist perspective somehow "explains" these things. I just don't see that it has any way of responding to the question.
For me, part of this will require a new scientific paradigm shift equivalent to general relativity replacing Newton's laws of gravity. Once we have a new conceptual model of the universe that successfully unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, we will be able to answer more of these questions.
Now, will we ever have answers to all of them? I doubt it; so, for scientists, I think it is necessary to be comfortable saying, for example, that we will *never* know for certain what caused the Big Bang. As you say, science is not designed to answer such questions.
With that said, if we take for granted that a) the universe exists and b) that it has consistent, fundamental physical properties, then we can successfully investigate lots of interesting questions about all the emergent systems and their dynamics through what we do know (the evidence we have and the models we have built), which is what I'm attempting with this series.
So, to paraphrase Stephen Weinberg's friend, we might not be able to explain *why* order emerges (as that would require understanding why the universe exists), but we can certainly describe *how* it emerges if we assume a) and b)
"it has consistent, fundamental physical properties"
I just had an interesting conversation with Pete Mandik, a philosopher who is publishing a book, "Physicalism" next year. He explained that apart from saying that "physical" refers to the laws of physics (which is a completely empty definition) the only thing philosophers who believe in physicalism can agree on is "Whatever is fundamental is not mental."
Which is, when you think about it, a statement of religious faith, not a piece of logical thinking.
You say we can take for granted that the fundamental properties of the universe are physical. But if the foundation of the universe is unconscious, there is no possible explanation of order. If the universe had its origin and exists primarily as something unconscious and unintelligent, the most logical outcome would be pure chaos, not order.
We can by definition never have contact with, or even evidence for, something "fundamentally non mental," (because everything we experience of an alleged physical world' is an interpretation made by our sense organs. There is no doubt some "x" which stimulates our senses, but science can't tell us anything about it.
Then we philosophize about order and emergence and invent - whole cloth - some imaginary non conscious non intelligent "stuff" and assume we have actually said something intelligible. There's absolutely no reason why the larger universe within which our individual minds exist cannot be of the same nature, rather than something supernatural and inconceivable that we've invented as an abstract conception, which we can never have any evidence for and which by definition makes any kind of order impossible.
I still don't understand this as being quite true. By way of question: a lifeless bright shimmering planetary ball of ice radiates less energy back out into space than the earth?
I don't see how the amazon jungle for instance is increasing entropy by utilizing the freely available energy of the sun. In the case of a star without planets that energy simply dissipates. The biosphere is not using up the energy of the sun any faster than the sun would be dissipating its energy anyhow. Where's the increased entropy? Is it just in the math?
It's interesting how "time is the rate of change of the state of any system" really clarifies time's foundational role across scales; such an insightfull take!
The answer is that it is not entropy that makes things happen — it is things happening that make entropy. Love this. So many cool nuggets in the article Nicholas. Well explained and written!
Fantastic essay! There's something very deep about this object-interaction paradigm: in the quantum realm, three out of the four physical basic interactions actually have particles that transmit them. We can focus particularly on gluons: at the interaction level, they tie the nuclei since they overcome the repelling force of same-charged protons; at the object level, they provide a significant fraction of the mass (m=E/c2, the way Einstein initially wrote) of the nucleus.
Let's jump up to the economy: in a gold-standard economy, money is both an object and an interaction, or a carrier of interaction if you will. Once people start to study the economy, it becomes an object itself, which is what happens with information too. The map becomes part of the territory, which is essentially cybernetics.
Another example: the platform economy is replacing the free market because in the free market, information was only an interaction, or a process happening inside every economic agent, while in the platform economy, information is also an object to be gathered and studied.
Thank you, Cristhian!
Yes, exactly — the dynamics of a subordinate system become elements (objects) within new superordinate emergent systems, whether in physics, neural networks, economics or technology. Your point about the platform economy is especially timely, as it illustrates the mechanics of the ongoing shift in the nature of the global economy.
I plan to explore cybernetics in more detail in a later article in this series — the self-correcting feedback loops (both within systems and between systems and their environment) are such an important part of how complex systems evolve
Is there any explanation as to how order emerges in the first place? Or how it continues? I don't see how the current scientific method can account for this. As Stephen Weinberg's friend said to him, "Science does not explain; it merely describes."
I have no intention of speaking on behalf of other philosophers.
I will simply say this: much of modern science is built on the application of Occam’s Razor. The assertion with the fewest assumptions is that the universe exists. The opposing viewpoint is solipsism, which poses far more questions than it answers.
I also disagree with your assertion that there is no possible explanation of order in an unconscious universe; order is an emergent property of any system that possesses dynamics capable of self-assembly and reproduction (given enough time). It is not sufficient to assert that chaos is the most logical outcome when I have outlined in this piece the mechanism for the introduction of order into chaotic systems; your assertion is akin to suggesting that water can never freeze because the most logical outcome would be to remain liquid, ignoring the dynamics between water molecules and nucleation sites that begin the freezing process.
While it is true that our entire experience of reality is mediated by our senses, our senses evolved over hundreds of millions of years to accurately represent features of the physical environment — animals that failed to produce sufficiently accurate representations were outcompeted to extinction. Survival of the fittest has honed our senses over millions of generations.
In addition, your assertion that science can’t tell us anything about the environment (loosely, the extreme scientific anti-realist position) has been heavily contested over the past century, and most anti-realists now take a more moderate position. I would encourage you to read my article “What is Mathematics?”, and then read John Worrall’s 1989 paper on structural realism for a more robust grounding here.
I’m familiar with Worrall, and from what you’re writing, everything you’re saying is in regard to empirical science mathematics, not philosophy.
What science can tell us about the environment is a scientific question. What we can know about what the fundamental nature of what it is that stimulates our senses to construct what we perceive as the envrionment is not a scientific or mathematical question, but a philosophical question.
If the only views you know are solipsism and physicalism, then I see we’re talking about radically different realms of inquiry and should probably leave it at that. This implies that you don’t know anything about substance dualism, dual aspect monism, pantheism, panentheism, subjective idealism, objective idealism, Kashmir Shaivism, Neo-Confucianism, Advaita Vedanta, qualified non dualism, Shaktism, classic theism, process theology, process philosophy, just to name over a dozen views which are wholly consistent with the data of modern science yet utterly at odds with physicalism.
Why don’t we leave it there?
Ah, I now see where you're coming from. I think we've been talking past each other, so let me summarise as I understand it (partly for clarity for any future readers).
You're not really critiquing science as such, but the implicit metaphysical claim you often see associated with it, that a purely metaphysical physicalist picture can explain why order exists at all, and so you believe that the foundation of reality must be mind-like to account for this.
My position is deliberately more limited, but it also differs from your framing in one important respect.
I do think there is an explanation for why order emerges within a law-governed universe: given stable dynamics, interaction rules, and constraints, order can arise by self-organisation, persistence of stable configurations, and selection-like filtering of unstable patterns over time. This goes beyond a description, and is a mechanism-level account of how order can arise and scale.
What I am explicitly not claiming, and what I agree may be permanently beyond empirical resolution, is an explanation for the deeper question of why the universe exists at all, or why it exists with consistent properties (laws) rather than different ones, or none.
But, given that the mechanism of how order arises given a universe with stable regularities is mechanistically describable (as I tried to outline in this article), it seems to me that your position ultimately reduces to the question of "why is there a law-governed universe?", as this is more fundamental than "why does order emerge within a law-governed universe?"
For that reason, I don't think the claim that "if the foundation of the universe is unconscious, there is no possible explanation of order" follows. We may not have (and may never have) an account of why the universe has consistent laws in the first place but, conditional on stable dynamics, order does not require a mind-like foundation to be explainable.
For clarity, my own philosophical view is closer to epistemic structural realism than to a strong metaphysical physicalism. I’m not claiming we access reality “as it is in itself”; I’m claiming that the regularities we model are not arbitrary projections, but track real relational structure well enough to yield constraint and prediction.
Beyond this, I’m not committed to any particular ontology, but I do believe that some have less merit than others.
This is why I brought up Occam’s Razor and mentioned solipsism. I wasn’t trying to reduce the philosophical landscape to two options, and I certainly wasn’t presenting "physicalism vs solipsism" as a complete map of positions. Physicalism entered the thread because you raised it explicitly; when I said "physical properties" earlier, I meant "stable regularities we can model" rather than commitment to physicalism as a metaphysical doctrine (though, in retrospect, I can see why you read it that way). My point was narrower and epistemic: if we deny that we can infer anything reliable about what lies beyond mediated experience, we slide toward radical scepticism, with solipsism being the cleanest limiting case. This ends up being a complete collapse of explanatory and predictive ambition.
If, instead, we accept fallible inference (models can be wrong yet progressively improved), then cross-scale description becomes possible, and that is the core of science. In the structural realist view, science is less about “things in themselves,” and more about increasingly constrained models of stable regularities and relations.
That’s the sense in which I invoked Occam’s Razor, as a discipline of minimising unnecessary assumptions while building predictive frameworks that actually work.
This is also why I think the conversation tends to land on consciousness. For many people, especially since Descartes, consciousness feels like the exception that forces an ontological break, with mind as a different kind of substrate rather than something that could emerge from non-mental dynamics.
I am not denying that dual-aspect or non-physicalist views can be made coherent and consistent with the data. My assertion is instead: across every domain where we’ve been able to gather detailed evidence, we repeatedly find higher-level properties emerging from organised dynamics rather than requiring a second fundamental “stuff”; given that pattern, Occam’s Razor suggests consciousness is most plausibly another emergent layer. That doesn’t pretend we already have the mechanism, but it is the lowest-assumption way to preserve continuity with the rest of our explanations. By contrast, treating consciousness as non-material in principle introduces an ontological exception that, at minimum, has to earn its explanatory and predictive weight.
I don’t expect to persuade you, and that isn’t my aim here. I mainly wanted to clarify that I’m not claiming science answers ultimate metaphysical “why” questions; I’m claiming that, given a universe with stable regularities (i.e. some form of realism, and not necessarily physicalism), emergence provides a non-mystical account of how order arises and persists within it, without any requirement of fundamental intelligence or panpsychism.
I appreciate the exchange, as it has helped me clarify my own philosophical position, and I’m happy to agree to disagree at this point.
Thank you for taking the time to respond in such detail. Surprise: I agree with every point you raised. I might phrase them differently. In fact, I would agree with your point that ‘consciousness” is emergent if we substituted “mind” for “consciousness.” I attempted to do this with another substack writer (who does openly hold a physicalist view) but I couldn’t find any way to convey what this means.
Your description of science as distinct from philosophy was among the best I’ve seen in quite awhile (William James put it very simply; science is a method with which we may find more than one philosophic view compatible)
the “mind” “consciousness” distinction is from Indian philosophy, where “chitta” is mind and “Chit” is Consciousness (Tantra is a less monistic, world-denying form of this than the more well known Advaita of Shankara)
If I could try this out with you (i’m sorry this is going to be overly simplistic; i’ just came up with this version in my conversation with the physicalist philosopher a day or so ago). This is an adaptation of a very simple analogy given by Indian teacher Ramana Maharshi. I’ve added some modern updates.
Imagine you’re sitting in a movie theater with a 50 foot IMAX screen, and watching a very well made 3D movie.
The movie screen is split - on the left side, you’re watching an overview of the scientific view of the emergence and development of the cosmos, all 13.8 billion years of it.
On the right side, you’re watching a group of scientists reviewing the experiments and theories developed over the past 400 years to support their view. For now, assume they all share your view (with regard to science, not philosophy).
you’re so absorbed in this fascinating film that at some point you completely forget you’re sitting in a movie theater and find yourself (without realizing it, forgetting who you actually are) IN the movie, talking with the scientists.
As they review all the cosmological, evolutionary and neuroscientific data, confirming all you’ve written and thought about, you start to realize they have no idea they’re in a movie, and no matter what you tell them about the film itself (the film unfolding in the projector) the light that projects the film, or the screen, which one might say is “transcendent” to all they know of the universe, they think you’re talking about something WITHIN the movie - the “movie” here referring to every possible bit of empirical data that scientists have examined over 4+ centuries.
You also realize that one could say, nothing in the movie could have started or emerged without the screen/light/film; it is responsible for all the order in the movie, and the very substance of everything in the movie universe is a combination of the light and the screen.
Advaita Vedanta tells us ONLY the screen is real, and the images of light and film itself are all merely illusory phenomena to which we should pay as little attention as possible. In this version, the screen is Chit, pure Consciousness, and all we know as “mind” AND “matter” is WITHIN the movie. Within the movie, “mind” is a recent emergent and arises in dependence on a material substratum, so any idealist philosophy which knows only “mind’ as it manifests within the movie ends up being anywhere from solipsistic to incoherent.
Tantric philosophy, on the other hand, tells us that the screen (Sat-Chit, Being Consciousness) along with the moving images of light (Chit-Shakti) and the play of both together (Ananda, or Bliss) are all equally important.
Sri Aurobindo adds one fundamental distinction - the unfolding of the movie is ALSO important and perhaps the most important thing going on. After all, we don’t go to a movie theater to look at a bare screen nor do we go simply to look at random images of light. We go for the story. And what is the greatest story ever told? The extraordinary evolutionary unfolding of the cosmos.
There are many many limitations to this analogy. The most important is it is completely mechanistic (in line with Maharshi’s tendency to elevate Shankara’s almost nihilistic view of Advaita or non dualism).
A much better analogy is lucid (or fully conscious) dreams, but I think I just realized this week, for the first time in more than 25 years of presenting it, why almost nobody who hasn’t meditated extensively AND experienced lcid dreams fails to understand it. When you’re IN the dream and fully aware, it’s not just that you’re aware of the dream universe, it’s like (to use a very rough analogy) you’re aware of the dream universe, the screen of Consciousness, the Light of the Word/Logos/Infinite Intelligence AND the mechanical karmic momentum of the “film”
Thanks for your effort to explicate your view. It helped me a great deal!
Ultimately it comes down to the physical laws of the universe: energy minimisation, gravity, etc. The earliest evidence of order is the cosmic microwave background, where quarks and electrons condensed into hydrogen atoms — thus reducing the potential energy of unpaired charges. And then gravity condensed disordered hydrogen clouds into highly ordered stars.
As for why it continues once it has formed, I plan on talking about temporal stability more in the next article in this series
Yes, this is a description of what we've observed about our sensory experience, and the regularities we've abstracted from that experience which we call "laws.'
But we still have absolutely no idea how the laws arose in the first place, nor how they continue, nor why they don't change.
This is not remotely a criticism of science, which is not designed to answer such questions. But there seems to be an implicit philosophic view that a purely naturalistic/physicalist perspective somehow "explains" these things. I just don't see that it has any way of responding to the question.
For me, part of this will require a new scientific paradigm shift equivalent to general relativity replacing Newton's laws of gravity. Once we have a new conceptual model of the universe that successfully unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity, we will be able to answer more of these questions.
Now, will we ever have answers to all of them? I doubt it; so, for scientists, I think it is necessary to be comfortable saying, for example, that we will *never* know for certain what caused the Big Bang. As you say, science is not designed to answer such questions.
With that said, if we take for granted that a) the universe exists and b) that it has consistent, fundamental physical properties, then we can successfully investigate lots of interesting questions about all the emergent systems and their dynamics through what we do know (the evidence we have and the models we have built), which is what I'm attempting with this series.
So, to paraphrase Stephen Weinberg's friend, we might not be able to explain *why* order emerges (as that would require understanding why the universe exists), but we can certainly describe *how* it emerges if we assume a) and b)
"it has consistent, fundamental physical properties"
I just had an interesting conversation with Pete Mandik, a philosopher who is publishing a book, "Physicalism" next year. He explained that apart from saying that "physical" refers to the laws of physics (which is a completely empty definition) the only thing philosophers who believe in physicalism can agree on is "Whatever is fundamental is not mental."
Which is, when you think about it, a statement of religious faith, not a piece of logical thinking.
You say we can take for granted that the fundamental properties of the universe are physical. But if the foundation of the universe is unconscious, there is no possible explanation of order. If the universe had its origin and exists primarily as something unconscious and unintelligent, the most logical outcome would be pure chaos, not order.
We can by definition never have contact with, or even evidence for, something "fundamentally non mental," (because everything we experience of an alleged physical world' is an interpretation made by our sense organs. There is no doubt some "x" which stimulates our senses, but science can't tell us anything about it.
Then we philosophize about order and emergence and invent - whole cloth - some imaginary non conscious non intelligent "stuff" and assume we have actually said something intelligible. There's absolutely no reason why the larger universe within which our individual minds exist cannot be of the same nature, rather than something supernatural and inconceivable that we've invented as an abstract conception, which we can never have any evidence for and which by definition makes any kind of order impossible.
I still don't understand this as being quite true. By way of question: a lifeless bright shimmering planetary ball of ice radiates less energy back out into space than the earth?
I don't see how the amazon jungle for instance is increasing entropy by utilizing the freely available energy of the sun. In the case of a star without planets that energy simply dissipates. The biosphere is not using up the energy of the sun any faster than the sun would be dissipating its energy anyhow. Where's the increased entropy? Is it just in the math?
The biosphere converts high frequency EM waves such as light into low frequency EM waves such as infrared. This process increases entropy.
Increases entropy in what closed system?