Order Is But An Illusion, Chaos Is All There Is

in #life8 years ago (edited)


 
Take a look around. The world seems pretty orderly right? Your computer has not exploded, your chair has not collapsed, the trees outside produce fruits, the air is breathable and the sun will rise once again tomorrow.
 
The entire solar system seems stable enough to keep you alive. The reality though is bit more complicated than that. Order, as we have come to identify it, is practically non existent. What we perceive around us as order, is nothing but a photographic snapshot of the consequential aftermath of chaos.
 
 

image credit

Linguistically Ignorant

Ultimately, our ignorance is what creates the idea of order. As primitive beings, we could not make sense of our surroundings so we invented stories to make sense of the world. The stories became language, religions, culture. One only has to consider where the word 'order' comes from; or better, the word 'nothing'. In reality there is never such thing as nothing. If we open our hand, we are still holding molecules of oxygen, bacteria, dust, food particles among other things. We merely use the word nothing in order to explain the world from our own perspective and make sense of our own personal affairs, not that of physical reality.

The word 'order' functions in much the same way. It doesn’t really exist. It just helps us classify items. If order was really something, governments would not constantly try to create laws or print money to save economies. Same applies with medication that provides us health, or cosmetics that make us look younger. They are nothing but a small dilation in the timeline of chaos. This is why when we stop using any of the above reality hits us harder than before. In the words of Ayn Rand:

You Can Avoid Reality, But You Cannot Avoid the Consequences of Avoiding Reality

 

image credit : mayfly

A Short-Sighted Mayfly

From our limited perspective, we experience order much like a mayfly living inside a car. The mayfly doesn’t realise that the car is moving 130 miles per hour, ready to crash and burn into non-existence. It’s size in respect to the car’s velocity makes the car appear a safe, stable environment, providing oxygen and breeding ground. Mayflies only live for 24 hours. One cannot imagine how such a short lifespan is perceived. It enjoys the order of the car’s ecosystem since it is the only thing it has ever known.

We are no different than the mayfly. Although we do live an average of 73 years or more, the universe doesn’t care about this little fact. Our universe is at least 14 billion years old. Our lifespan or the mayfly’s perspectively to the universe is insignificant. The mayfly lives on a moving car’s carpet while we live on a rock floating through a desolate dark space. The mayfly might have had 10-15 generations inside the car in just under a month. We, as a species, existed on this earth for about 200.000 years. In respect to the earth’s lifespan, we are much like a mayfly living inside a moving car.

   


image credit : monitor pixels

Zoom In, Zoom Out

Days pass in our lives and nothing seems to change really. We grow up, go to school, get married, have our own kids but then if an unfortunate event occurs, we immediately seek order. It is as if we are unaware that every single event around us is governed by chaos. We have difficulty accepting that a life event, whatever it might be, is just more entropy introduced into the system.

About ~300.000 bacteria rule our bodies on a daily basis, fighting each other, controlling every single hormone and neurotransmitter secreted in our bodies. The time we eat, drink and make love is controlled by those little lifeforms. We are the result of their war. They live and die for us. We are the universe of those bacteria. Whether we spontaneously develop cancer, or miraculously recover from it, it doesn’t make much of a difference to them. The effect is only perceived by us as living beings. Chaos rules those events all the time. Order is only perceived when standing from a specific distance. In our case it is just an average lifespan of 75 rotations of our planet in respect to it’s home star.

The hurricane that killed thousands of people is as chaotic as the earthquakes that made volcanoes on earth sprout and provide a sustainable atmosphere. Forest fires, species going extinct, people dying while others are being born, all are part of chaos. Never order. We try to make sense of these incomprehensible events by building religious narratives or manufacturing spiritual fairytales about karma, positive thinking and maybe, just maybe an afterlife — or a place of some sort where we can live forever. It is as if we were desperately trying to hang on from a lie; one that if we repeat long enough can become true. The very idea of paradise flourishes because deep inside we understand that the world is chaotic; but we don’t want to accept it. Perhaps this is also why we cry at funerals even if we believe our loved ones are in a better place. Are they really?

   


image credit

Perspective

We are a by-product of entropy. We are certainly not the center of the universe as many would like to believe. This world was not build for us. We are merely a random result of it. Douglas Adams explains this concept with a story about a puddle of mud, suddenly gaining consciousness;

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

In the course of our lifespan, we continuously introduce more and more entropy struggling to stay alive. Truth is, since our conception, we are all constantly degrading, dying. A child born with leukemia perceives order in a vastly different way compared to someone else who is in his 20’s and never really had to go the doctor. Miracles and luck work much the same way. There are people who swear that they saw an image of their God right before an accident and as a result they were saved. We hear this so often simply because the vast majority who also went through a similar experience is now dead. We perceive order in a form of illusion collecting only the data that suit us; never those that seem to go against us. Like Donald Rumsfeld has put it:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Only instantaneously we exist as tiny orderly islands in the ocean of chaos. In much the same way, inside a star, hydrogen atoms fuse in an instant to create heavier elements. Up until then they had been orderly. From the perspective of the hydrogen atoms this is chaotic and unsettling. From the perspective of the star it owes to happen so that it can exist.


image credit : bacteria

The 350.000 kinds of aforementioned microbes living inside of us, disturb the order of each other much like the hydrogen does inside a star. Microbes fight or cooperate with each other depending on their numbers. In the same respect a general sees war as order, where a refugee sees it as chaos. What is chaos for the fly is order for the spider. In all cases, order is nothing more but the illusion held by the eyes of the beholder.

Physics seem to agree with the notion of chaos as well. The second law of thermodynamics in combination with special relativity do not allow order to take place. A parallel to this concept would be taking a screenshot of your computer while playing a movie. The pixels producing the screenshot seem stationary. It is as if they sit tightly to produce an orderly image of your favourite actor. In fact, those tiny switches, produce a random sequence of photons that are perceived sensibly through your brain when you stand far enough. Glue your eyes on the computer screen and you won’t make sense of anything.

In much the same way we are standing now on a planet with objects light years apart from us. For a sense of perspective let us migrate to a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy to our own. If we look back at earth we wouldn’t even see that we exist yet. We would be looking into the past of about 250.000 years. This effect can be observed on earth as well. When one stands at the shores of a beach, gazing an approaching ship through the horizon line, one travels back in time for about one second. Nothing around us takes place in real time. It takes 490 seconds for light from the sun to reach earth and about another 20,000 years traveling from inside the sun to its surface. The universe has already ended but from our perspective we are still experiencing it. Most of the stars you see in the sky produce intensive wavelengths of radiation. When they reach earth (because they will) all life as we know it will be eradicated. It is much like watching a car coming towards you in a very slow motion, standing still, frozen, unable to do anything about it.
 

Now What?

The understanding of life on a deeper level requires embracement of chaos as the basis of reality. Only then the world can really start making sense. Much of our suffering as individuals revolves around the denial of chaos. There are many ways to get around this barrier but first we need to shed our cultural and ideological frame. Understanding reality means rejecting everything we hold dear, whether it is science, religion or narratives about the world around us. Only then we can structure chaos to work in our favour.



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What is life, if not a fight against entropy?
Reminded me of this:

@razvanelulmarin

perhaps my favourite tv quote of all time

I know. It still gives me the goosebumps

Great post! The second law of thermo (entropy) definitely embraces chaos. Thanks for sharing. You should checkout the @mindunleashed! 🐣

order is a tool used by chaos, to create more chaos. what people are mistaking for order is the local, homeostatic equilibrium that people who are exposed to nothing else become inured to. in an open system there form momentary pockets of seeming stability, even extropy but these do not last. most people wouldn't be able, in a thousand years, to comprehend the howling maelstrom just outside of their tailored perception.

@lifeworship

Indeed "local" is the right word here. It will be much easier to come to the realisation of chaos if we were standing further away from the universe.

we'd get a good sense of chaos if we were standing in the middle of the sun, or in the accretion disc of a black hole, or at the shock front of a supernova. provided we could survive long enough to witness it.

@lifeworship

Just the sheer size perspective would make the earth look like a grain of sand and that is where the black hole would look ordely and the earth disorderly :)

A thought provoking post. But for me, well, all I see is order. What you call chaos, seems from my perspective to be an integral part of a perfectly ordered universe, breaking things down so that something new can be built, like a child knocks down the tower they've built out of blocks so that they can make something else.

As for randomness, it seems to me a big assumption with no evidence to back it up. Sure, many things seem random, but if we had complete information about the entire universe, patterns might emerge from this assumed randomness. And it seems we will never know enough about the universe to be certain that randomness really exists.

But as the words self organize in my head and my brain responds by sending messages to my fingers to type them into my device, I can't help but think that, yes, maybe you're right. Maybe all of the order I perceive is merely illusion, and all that really exists is chaos. And the mind perceiving that chaos has nothing better to do than imagine that chaos is something else.

And the universe has already ended, from some perspective, as you say - The Big Crunch. But after that there's another Big Bang, isn't there? And shouldn't that have already begun, and ended, and begun again, an uncountable number of times, from an even more distant perspective?

We cannot escape from order. It's the only place from which chaos makes any sense.

@kendewitt

What you call chaos, seems from my perspective to be an integral part of a perfectly ordered universe.

From our perspective it does. I explain in detail why it is not from the grander look of things.

As for randomness, it seems to me a big assumption with no evidence to back it up. Sure, many things seem random, but if we had complete information about the entire universe, patterns might emerge from this assumed randomness.

How do you know? In fact all the evidence we have is that processes are indeed random. From the constants of physical laws to their outcomes.

The Big Crunch. But after that there's another Big Bang, isn't there? And shouldn't that have already begun, and ended, and begun again, an uncountable number of times, from an even more distant perspective?

yes. exactly. is all about perspective and standing point of view

Here's my point, kind of, although I was just thinking out loud (or typing out loud, I guess). This is from a thread on the Physics Stack Exchange (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24390/can-randomness-exist)

Chaos is not randomness, it is insufficient knowledge about the initial conditions. Admittedly, you'd need perfect knowledge of initial conditions, but leaving aside QM this is possible in principle if not in practice. It's only when you include QM that you find perfect knowledge of the initial conditions is impossible in principle.

So there's a distinction between chaos and randomness. We can never know all initial conditions. So we can also never know if anything is truly random.

But we know order when we see it, or measure it. For anything that doesn't seem to be ordered we can only say it appears to be random.

So randomness may exist, and it may not. There is apparently no way to make sure. My guess is that it probably does exist, because I can't imagine myself to be living in a completely ordered and deterministic universe. It just doesn't feel right.

But neither can I see this universe as completely random, or dominated by randomness. That doesn't feel right, either.

@kendewitt

Indeed there is a difference but initial conditions not only cannot be known but knowing them would actually be like dividing by zero and the whole universe would cease to exist. We are getting into way more philosophical rather than practical implications.

We measure order only from a given perspective. For example sand blown over your living room floor is disorder. Sand blown through a machine to clean that floor is order. This is why order is rather a silly word we use in order to communication a very limited range of events in the macro aspect of our reality.

If the universe was orderly in every way, that is, the elements and the constants then it wouldn't have existed.

It makes more sense to view the world as random and depending on the focal length of your perception to distinguish between the seeming order

Thanks for your reply. I'm just an armchair philosopher and wannabe author, so it's nice talking to people who seem to know what they're talking about on these topics.

In your example of sand blown across a carpet (by the wind, I presume) the disorder is in the arrangement the sand ends up in, and the chances of such an event happening.

And with the sand machine, I guess you meant that the perceived order is in the consciousness operating the machine, the intention behind it?

So, is it that consciousness creates order, by physical manipulation via a body, or by mentally projecting order onto apparent disorder?

It seems to me that there are two forms of order - order created by living beings in order to suit their purposes, and order that exists in nature, which may be real, i.e. the structure of an atom, or simply perceived, i.e. seeing a face in a mountain on Mars.

But disorder, I still can't wrap my head around it. There is definitely perceived disorder, i.e. an illiterate person who sees nothing but gobbledygook in written text. But actual disorder... I mean, entropy is the the tendency toward uniformity, which seems to me a form of order.

Maybe we are actually saying the same thing. You see the tendency toward equilibrium as disorder, but I see it as another form of order, for now anyway, my mind tends to switch back and forth as I digest information.

Both order and chaos are words that humans made up to describe the world. But maybe neither accurately points to what's really going on.

No worries. We are all armchair philosophers.

It is not so much as the consiousness creating order, rather than perceiving order. In the example of the floor our culture has ingrained us with the idea that floors should not have sand and that we should clean stains with a sand machine. The universe doesn't care about these actions. physical reality does not change. Only in our perception these things take place.

I gave the example of the tv pixels for a better clarification. zoom and take a photograph of your tv and you see green, blue and red lights. Stand afar and you see moving images. Its all about the perspective. Everything is disordered around us and only the point of view matters.

This is why you hear people saying that they make the best out of bad situations. Really, there is no such thing as "bad situation". This is why order is just an illusion. People try to balance things out in respect to something else (in order to achieve what is perceived orderly) but things never work as such in life. Whether we talk about relationships or the markets the phenomenon is a non-existent thing nowhere else oher than our heads.

Let me give you another example (The physics are approximate) just to demonstrate the Incalculability of the matter. Consider a pool table game. By the first game you can, with accurate mathematics, to predict where each and every ball will land on the table. To do the math for the second move it becomes exponentially more difficult although with the assitance of a supercomputer maybe you can do it in a decade. By the time you reach the 3rd game you will need to take into considerationt the gravitational pull of the people around the table. By the 5th the position of the planets in our galaxy. By the 7th game (or so) you will need to know the exact position of every single atom in the entire universe. All these, to predict accurately the position of any ball in a single pool table game considering that the universe will hold still at the end of it. In our ever expanding universe the task becomes simply impossible. simply. it does not apply.

Indeed the linguistic barrier is hard to shed in order to wrap one's head around this. We do agree on the subject. I am actually enjoying the fact you see it from your own perspective. it think validates more my point about subjective perception.

Intense!! very intense

Incorrect. Order is a localized statistical anomaly. As conditions change, it degrades, creating the illusion that it is an illusion.

@irvingprime

this

"Order is a localized statistical anomaly."

exactly

So, your response itself, which seems quite ordered, to me, is a localized statistical anomaly? Or am I missing something?

ofcourse, it is. our entire lives are. the comment took 1 second to make in a 14 billion year old universe on a planet that is a grain of sand in respect to the architecture that belongs to.

Hmm, are life and consciousness a localized statistical anomaly, or a distributed statistical inevitability? How could we possibly determine that without knowing if and how much other life exists throughout the universe?

I could have bet when I saw the title that there's going to be entropy here. we share similar ideas @kyriacos!

@cristi

that's nice to hear. We should have interesting conversations then!

Amen. I'll send you a drawing if you will accept it. Was going to give it to a random person but none showed up.

@mikkolyytinen

sure. send it through

@kyriacos Allright, can you send a message to my fb-page with your mailing address: https://www.facebook.com/mikkolyytinenart/

This definitely made me stop and look at things a little differently. Great post! Thanks for sharing!

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