Notwithstanding the title of this blog post, I don’t really believe that the universe knows itself in the same way we do. That is, the universe isn’t self-aware. I simply mean that the universe does its universe’ing thing with an ease and completeness that is far from the limited knowledge we humans have of the universe, laboriously arrived at over thousands of years.
I’ve been listening to an interesting conversation Sam Harris had with Alex O’Connor called “What is Experience?” that is on his Waking Up app. O’Connor is more open than Harris to the possibility that consciousness is inherent in the universe, rather than being localized in brains, notably the human brain.
Harris, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, said that there’s reason to believe that evolution hasn’t equipped humans with the ability to know certain things, such as the nature of conscious experience or the classic question, why is there something rather than nothing? After all, evolution selects for reproductive fitness, not truth.
So it’s virtually certain that no matter how much we learn about ourselves, the planet we inhabit, and the universe at large, some knowledge is always going to be outside of our grasp — in much the same way as a monkey will never learn calculus, regardless of how high a monkey IQ it has.
In his book, Physics Fixes All the Facts, Liam Graham speaks about the limited ability of mathematical equations to describe the universe in “closed form solutions.” A frequently-cited example I’ve seen in various science books is the three body problem (there was a streaming show with that name, I recall). Consider a large planet orbiting a small star.
That’s a two body problem. It can be perfectly described in equations describing the motion of celestial objects. But add another large planet, and the resulting three body problem is intractable by any equation. Graham says:
For three bodies, the force experienced by one of them is the sum of the gravitational attraction of the other two. But despite this simplicity, the system can only be solved explicitly for restricted special cases. Th most useful one is when one of the bodies has negligible mass compared to the other two, for example a spacecraft traveling through the earth-moon system or an asteroid influenced by the gravity of Jupiter and the sun.
…In general there is no closed-form solution. But the system is easy to solve by simulation. When this is done, the result is mesmerizing patterns of motion with long periods of smoothness punctuated by abrupt changes. An infinitesimal change in the initial conditions can produce completely different patterns. Such simulations have also discovered thousands more stable configurations, some of which are illustrated in Fig. 7.1.
In other words, a simulation that mimics the dynamics of three celestial bodies can reproduce their behavior, while an abstract mathematical equation can’t. I’m reminded of how many scientists take seriously the possibility that we are living in a simulation created by an advanced alien civilization. If it is a high quality simulation, there’s little chance that we could ever discern the difference between it and the non-simulated universe we assume we’re part of.
The basic notion of a simulation is to run it and see what happens, because it is impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen in any other way. The Game of Life is this sort of simulation. It only has a few simple rules. Even so, Graham says:
For a given starting pattern, there is no way in general proving whether a given pattern will ever be created. The only way to find out is to run the system and see.
This is just how life itself works. We humans love to create rules about how we think life either should work, or does work. But they have very limited utility. I’ve found that many of the things I hope will happen, actually don’t happen, while many of the things I hope won’t happen, actually do happen. This is another sign that the universe knows way more than I do about how things happen — which isn’t at all unexpected.
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Duh
“I simply mean that the universe does its universe’ing thing with an ease and completeness that is far from the limited knowledge we humans have of the universe, laboriously arrived at over thousands of years.”
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Indeed, I’d refer to it as cause and effect. The Buddhist would refer to it as ‘dependent origination’ in describing the interconnectedness of all phenomena – but they go further, introducing emptiness and the like, which gets a bit complicated.
Interconnectedness, I feel, is something that we humans generally pay little heed to in not deeply appreciating the way that all life, indeed including everything inorganic, is intrinsically connected. Hence the destruction of environments, seas, and the atmosphere. We behave in an almost unconscious way, too afraid to accept the damage we are causing in case we had to curtail our rampant consumerism, which may affect our standard of living, our ‘God-given’ right to always be accumulating more and more – usually at the expense of anyone or anything else.
And yes, it does seem to me that there will always be things we don’t understand – and perhaps don’t need to. But we can still be curious in a wonderment sort of way and accept our limitations; after all, we are merely biological human primates that have evolved the ability to think in concepts, think in the abstract. Which is no doubt how we come to believe that we are special; where all our hopes and desires for that ‘something more’ – as though the aliveness we have is not enough.
This is a realization , not something I thought of but something accrued such as knowledge .Something that has occurred to me recently is that I am not on the path because the path ended. It did have a destination. I’m there. The nameless region. And there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so don’t you quit just cuz I made it to the finish line. And where there is One there is no longer need for two. I only have my own humility to thank and I could hardly do that and remain humble so I will just say nothing, do nothing and be nothing. I’ll let the businessmen drink my wine.