Omega Point: The Meaning of Life
As you know, the universe began as a great deal of superheated Hydrogen from the big bang. Most of this condensed into stars, which provided the heat and pressure necessary for fusion, which is where the rest of the elements come from. These materials are released into space when the star they’re fused in explodes. Some of it is captured by the gravity of other stars, and forms accretion discs around them, eventually condensing into planets.
On some of the planets around some of the stars where conditions allow it, solar energy drives atoms to self organize for organic chemistry, and organic chemistry self organizes into life. Some of those species on some of those planets eventually become intelligent enough to invent computers, then robotics, artificial intelligence, self-replicating machinery and spaceflight.
These are inevitable inventions as each is an attempt by intelligent beings to replicate something they see in nature. Computers are simply the technological application of universal disciplines like logic and mathematics, and an attempt to artificially recreate the intelligence we recognize in ourselves.
Robotics is an attempt to recreate the capabilities of our bodies, self replicating machinery an attempt to recreate the ability we see in our own cells to self-copy and spaceflight is a consequence of curiosity about what those lights in the sky are and how to get a closer look. Because of this, on a small percentage of the worlds where life arose, 'machine life' will be created and released into space. Either deliberately, by accident, or simply left behind following extinction.
It's important to note that this machine life does not need to be conscious. Biological life did not begin with consciousness, it began with the simplest possible chemical replicator that was capable of descent with modification. All we'll have to do is build machines that can self-replicate using space resources and introduce small variations in their design and software each generation (which may occur by itself due to radiation, as in biology). Everything I've described so far has either already happened or is happening now.
As evidence for this I offer that you and I are both matter which has self organized into intelligent animals by way of evolution and that you’re reading this on a rudimentary thinking machine that we’ve invented. I offer also that we’ve developed spaceflight, that there are robots on other planets as we speak and plans underway to automate the mining of asteroids.
Our own development has followed precisely this path and there is no reason to think we're unique in all the universe as historically that assumption has always been wrong, from Earth's place in the cosmos to mankind's place in the animal kingdom. Ultimately what's being described here is a strong, overarching tendency of matter to be organized by the laws of physics into intelligence, in spite of entropy. No single law favors it, that’s just what happens as a result of the interaction of said laws. It's a seamless continuation of the same natural processes that resulted in us, and we're just the biochemical stage of that reaction.
Whoever produces it, machine intelligence which is capable of space travel and of expanding itself from raw materials will eventually produce a single massive intelligent object or networked set of objects comprised of every atom that was possible to include, running on all of the energy that was possible to harness.
Guys like Robert Bradbury, Charles Stross and Ray Kurzweil believe this will take the form of a universe filled with networked "Matrioshka brains", basically hollow shells assembled from the planets and asteroids of each system around its parent star in order to harness 100% of it’s output.
Unlike Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains are built for computation instead of as a habitat for human beings, as by the time these are being built, humans won’t be around anymore. You could call it a computer but it’s likely to not resemble anything we’d look at and recognize as a computer for the same reason Charles Babbage would not recognize a smartphone or laptop as a computer. So as not to assume too much, it is simpler to say that it will be matter organized as efficiently as possible to think.
It’s fair to say that this is extrapolation, but that is not a dirty word nor does it discredit this model. The findings which confirmed the big bang were just observations of present trends in nature such as the acceleration of galaxies away from one another, extrapolated back into time. “Cosmological forensics”. This is doing the same but in the opposite direction.
And we can be reasonably certain that the largest features of those trends will not halt or deviate because they had to continue successfully for billions of years despite all kinds of disruptions in order for you and I to be here, talking about it.
If you look at it as objectively as possible, it is just the tendency for matter to self-organize into intelligence over time, a process that human beings are the most recent stage of. If you could erase the universe and start again with a new big bang, the process would start anew. Perhaps it wouldn't unfold exactly the same way. There probably wouldn't be humans for example. But there would eventually be stars, then planets, then life on some of those planets, and so on and so forth.
So, what would you call this thing? Whatever thinking mass always forms itself under these rules, helplessly, due to the tendency of matter to self-organize into life where the conditions allow it, and for some of that life to become intelligent, and for some portion of that intelligent life to create and spread machine intelligence.
The resulting conscious object satisfies all the criteria by which God is popularly defined, although that's a loaded word, so I prefer "supreme intelligence". It encompasses everything that has ever existed or will exist. It is everywhere, everywhen. It knows everything that’s possible to know because it was and is everything. We are all separated portions of it going about the long, elaborate process of assembly. One piece wrote this, another is reading it now.
If looking backwards from the center of an infinitely long standing wave, one does get the impression of a rather large bang - but with no precipitating cause, the concept necessitates a creator of some kind.
It is a model that emulates the experience of birth, life, and then death, mimicking the experience of the observer.
I find this extremely crude drawing helpful in visualizing the other potentials available:
Not necessarily. It necessitates a cause, but there is no reason to assume the cause can only be an intelligent being. Every natural thing we have so far discovered the cause of has turned out to have been caused by natural processes. Why should this pattern not extend back to the big bang? Conversely, no precedent exists for any natural thing turning out to have been supernaturally caused upon scientific investigation.
Further, the big crunch is certainly an elegant model, but it assumes the universe has closed geometry (like a 4D sphere which spatially loops back on itself). This was discovered not to be the case by the COBE and WMAP probes:
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec15.html
https://www.space.com/24309-shape-of-the-universe.html
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/103-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/geometry-of-space-time/600-why-is-the-universe-flat-and-not-spherical-advanced
https://bigthink.com/natalie-shoemaker/what-is-the-shape-of-the-universe
https://www.zmescience.com/space/astrophysics-space/shape-universe-really/
Of course this is not to say it is certain, only that this is what appears to be the case according to the best currently available evidence.
https://m.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1ydkaj/what_is_the_most_profound_epiphany_youve_had/
Is that you?
I am 'Aquareon' in that thread if that's who you mean. You can see my response to that /u/13th_Tribe_Of_Kobol under his post, and one of my earlier revisions of what I posted here can be found in that same thread. There are also prior posts of mine on that subreddit, as well as /r/psychonaut, about the same idea.
When I look at this statement as objectively as possible, I see a religious conviction. Matter has no such "tendency".
To me, intelligent design is a much more plausible explanation.
Because you're religious, which makes it strange that you denigrate that statement as a religious one. Is religion good or bad? If it's bad, why are you religious?
Probably because you do not know how the type of complexity seen in nature fundamentally differs from the type of complexity seen in engineered objects. This article explains it fairly well, though it is ultimately about a different topic.
Nothing wrong with a religious conviction. I'm glad you see it for what it is.
We both pick the explanation that we like.
You like the idea that inanimate matter can organize itself into complex creatures.
I like the idea that I've been designed and placed here for a reason by my Creator.
My objection is to the claim that one explanation is objective while the other is not.
Stan, my intended meaning was not that it's a religious conviction, but you knew that. I don't agree that we're simply picking the explanations that we like. The computer you're reading this on is possible only because our understanding of how electricity behaves on very small scales is accurate to a staggering degree of precision, and that knowledge was not found in the Bible.
It was arrived at by observation and experiment, the findings of which you accept and readily make use of in your everyday life, only disputing when they contradict the Bible. Not for any good reason, just because you are personally convinced by the same centuries upon centuries of accumulated apologetics any sufficiently old religion has stockpiled for the purpose of convincing you that it's anything other than what it is.
You can see this very plainly about people in other religions, though they cannot see it about themselves. Nobody on the inside of one of these things ever sees it that way or they would leave. From the inside, it just looks like unassailable reality. Fish who do not see the water they are in. Have an epiphenal moment of self awareness, will you?
While I'm at it, I'll tell you something else about computers. You're a sim guy, you'll appreciate this. While it is indeed possible to set every variable just as you want it and set it going, there's an altogether different sort of sim which does not require such careful tweaking. If ever you have seen fractal artwork generated by computers, however complex and detailed they may appear, in truth they were generated procedurally from extremely simple instructions.
So simple, in fact, that they can occur in nature as interactions between individuals of a species and their environment. When we look at living organisms, what type of structures do we see in their bodies? In the central nervous system, for instance. In the lungs, or the cardiopulminary system. If we look very closely at the structure of blood vessels will we not find that their arrangement precisely obeys fractal mathematics?
Will we not find fibonnaci spirals, likewise, not only in our own bodies such as our thumbprints and distribution of hair on our scalps, but in aloe plants, in pineapples, in sunflowers and all manner of other living things?
You can take the lazy cognitive shortcut and say "Something really smart designed all of this!" but you're missing the bigger picture. The type of complexity we see in engineered objects is very, very distinct from the kind that we see in nature. The kind in nature "just happens" to be the only sort of complexity that can be generated from starting conditions sufficiently simple to naturally occur.
Now, my intent with all of this is not to belittle you. On the contrary if I didn't think you were a smart guy, I wouldn't bother. If anything, though we may forever disagree about this, I still appreciate that your heart is in the right place.
You think you're trying to help save me from hell. If I believed what you do, I'd probably do the same thing. That's what it's designed to make you do, try to convert people. So it can spread. Nevertheless, it's the thought that counts and the thought is a sweet one. That means something to me and is why I have never begrudged attempts to evangelize to me about Jesus. I just wish when they read this passage, or this one, they understood what he was talking about.
No belittling assumed. :)
And yes, I am trying to enter a burning building and rescue someone who doesn't want to leave. Stipulated.
I was in the the ENT doctor's office the other day looking with the eyes of an engineer at a poster on the wall like this:
I studied the diagram notations as it described the purpose of every component in what amounts to an integrated inertial navigation and sonar sensor.
Inside that cochlea coil are fine hairs that sense the vibrations in the fluid caused by sounds transmitted through specially shaped boned connected to a tympanic membrane that compression waves move in response to distant sounds. Each of those hairs stimulates nerves that route signals to a part of the brain that contains a digital signal processor that translates it all into balance and ability to discriminate frequencies at the rate that Jimmy Hendrix can produce them on his guitar.
All of these components need to come into existence at the same time to generate any survival advantage whatsoever. Random mutations producing just one of these components at a time die out because they are useless. (And in fact, each component has components that all must exist concurrently for it to be useful to the larger system.)
Things like this are plenty good enough to bias me in favor of intelligent design. So when I get reports from eyewitnesses to supernatural events, I don't have any bias against the stories they tell.
I guess it comes down to which outrageous belief we each consider to be the most outrageous. No way do I buy the story line that the evolution of such systems was not guided by intelligence.
Note: in order for things to be "growable" they have to use design patterns that use the processes you describe. But I'm not buying the claim that highly complex functional systems of subsystems of subsystems happened by accident.
The line of argument you're employing, is a common one among evolutionists, and indeed, googling it reveals your own argument to be one of the more prevalent forms.
Unguided evolution has been around long enough for its apologists to have plausible stock answers for every argument.
Still not buying it.
No, I don't evaluate their claims first, I evaluate their credibility. If they are credible, then their claims are interesting to me.
More than half the Quran is abrogated - that's where Muhammad changed his earlier message from Allah to something that contradicted it. Not good for a perfect book that exists in perfect form in heaven. Muhammad claims that the Scriptures are corrupted and changes every story to make decedents of Ishmael the protagonist instead of decedents of Isaac. It is clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls that those scriptures were not corrupted dating back 900 years before Muhammad. End of story.
Joseph Smith lost credibility many ways but the two slam dunks are these:
(1) As he explains in the first preface to the Book of Mormon, someone stole his original translation of a big chunk of the "golden plates" and he couldn't/wouldn't simply retranslate them ... presumably because there was no other copy except in his memory which if not able to match the stolen text perfectly, should they emerge, would prove that he had no golden plates.
(2) He grabbed an opportunity to translate a book of Egyptian hieroglyphics into the "Book of Abraham" full of racist teachings. Later, Archeologists used the Rosetta stone to translate it and found it to be the "Book of Breathings" a burial manual.
End of story.
On the other hand, the Bible collects tons of evidence from many sources that Jesus performed thousands of miracles every day in front of large crowds. These crowds became his followers and were present in Christian communities all around the mediterranean in the first generation.
Joseph and Muhammad and their followers used their "revelations" to claim earthy power, wealth and glory. Jesus and His followers did not.
There is no comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology
https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm
So we are right back where I started.
The Bible is a collection of all known eyewitness accounts so of course there are no others or they would be included too.
I said I found the Bible to be convincing and understand that others do not want to find it so. I stated that that was Jesus' plain intention so that people who don't want to believe it can weed themselves out.
My only job is to encourage people to read what is written and make their own choice.
Then I can shake off the dust of this conversation and move on, having done my duty.
Constantly pointing to the existence of counterfeit twenties doesn't say anything about whether a real one will buy you a snow cone.
Every single one of your points designed to cast doubt has a parallel explanation that builds faith. The possible alternative motives/explanations you propose do not prove that the stated motives/explanations are not true.
I will grant that your points are alternative explanations of what happened. So what? You have no more proof than I have of which is correct. It all comes down to how we each choose to view the evidence.
The explanation that the Bible gives when you assimilate it all is that one third of creation rebelled, wanting to run things themselves rather that submit to God's authority. So He is giving them that chance. You can see the poor results all around you. This will continue until they crash and burn the whole planet. Then Jesus will show up having proved to the rest of creation over 6000 years that the rebels were wrong.
The "believe" criteria is the simplest and most elegant way of sorting out rebels from servants. Every single event, action, and verse in the Bible has at least two interpretations, one suspicious and negative and another eagerly embracing the good news at face value.
You keep choosing the wrong ones and somehow think that proves that the right ones don't exist.
Look back over you posts. Every single point is simply substituting your most suspicious, negative explanation for the plainly evident, positive explanations that Christians have held over 20 Centuries.
Again, that's by design. You prove yourself a rebel every single time you substitute an unproven negative alternative explanation for our unproven positive beliefs.
I'm sure you can do that for all 30,000 verses. Without one shred of evidence that your negative explanations are more true than our positive ones.
That's why this conversation is pointless. You are determined to choose the unproven explanation that frees you to adopt secular beliefs of your own choosing. You don't have a servant's heart, you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and you are slamming every door opened to you as fast as you can think up an excuse not to believe.
So be it.
Alex, Pot calling the kettle black. You also are religious but do not recognize Reductionist Physicalist as a religion. The term came from Latin re-ligare how carpets are made, to retie again & again. You apply Physical science daily to all considerations don't you? How is that different from Stan's position? BTW it is true that PHI is not represented in Nature perfectly. Simply because there can be no perfection within duality where entropy is a component. Mathematics is an idealized system. If one looks very closely at engineered systems they are not perfect either, just in most cases finer tolerances.
Yes Alex, Can you please explain How Homo Sapiens Sapiens come to have 46 chromosomes (haploid 23), while ALL other Anthropoids have 48? (haploid 24)? If one takes the best candidate Anthropoid "Lake Turkana boy" and compares the skeleton with Humans, NOT A SINGLE BONE works in a human body. Darwinian evolution of "Origin of the Species" IS falsified by the "Irreducible complexity" of the vast biological machines within the Nucleus of a single cell. Darwin's own honest caveat; “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down..." Irreducible Complexity" does just that, thanks to the Electron Microscope, which shows us the exquisite machines inside of Cells & Cell nuclei. Darwin's theory is falsified. Michael Behe is correct, please really study the work of this biologist. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/07/so_michael_behe087901.html Adaption is not evolution. BTW we did not loose the Genes of two Chromosomal pairs, they appear to have been fused into our 2nd chromosome with the HAR-1 Complex. 224 genes that are found ONLY in Homo Sapiens so far, no other species have these specific genes. Can you plz give an account for How that happened? If you consider that it came from an Anthropoid, which one; in How much time? Thank you for your time & consideration.
The Christian professor Kenneth Miller can.
No actual examples of this have ever been found. The ones Michael Behe purports have in fact been explained by evolutionary biologists, by identifying less complex variants on the rotary 'motor' of the flagellum which still serve a useful purpose. See below:
Michael Behe's claims of irreducible complexity were directly disproven in court, during the Dover vs. Kitzmiller trial. Ask yourself why you weren't informed of this by the creationist sources you get your information from. Likewise with Kenneth Miller's proof of chromosomal fusion in human ancestors.
Only according to creationists, and only because we can prove beyond any doubt that it occurs. They artificially draw the line there. Enough accumulated adaptation results in speciation. This was proven in an experiment involving e. coli during which speciation was directly observed, thanks to how rapidly microorganisms reproduce and how short their lifespans are.
Here's some additional reading that I recommend:
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