Saturday, March 25, 2017

Here's A Philosophical Question For You

Has the basic point to, and strategy of, biological life always been to get to a level of structure where choice (remember how important choice can be in testing things like light?) via a meaning processor, is available?

Has it always been a race between two ways progressing after the singularity, and things started to cool down?

In the first, with things coming together as quanta, and then atomic structure, beginning the overall expansion of what, and when, you would have only non choice interactions going on to mediate better outcomes. In other words, the basic interactions of mass and energy so that the elements of the periodic table would start at the simplest, and get progressively more complex via fusion repeated over and over; to then create more complex molecular structures via irradiation, accretion (with the subsequent heat and pressure), as well as further, follow on chemical reactions with the new found, more complex compounds, etc.

Then you have biology finally kicking in with the processing structures for getting, holding on to, and making meaning of, information. Getting. Holding. Creating.  All in sufficient combination to provide a counterbalance to a fall to ultimate uniformity?

Said another way, if life, at least to the degree that it does create meaning processors, with the ability to make choices, didn't ever get started (however improbable that might be), or stay existing long enough, is there any other physical reason why a reality wouldn't always end up in a final entropy of total uniformity? Can the ordinary mixing of matter create it's own continuance in an ongoing expansion event?

Certainly, we don't even know now whether meaning processors, and nothing but good choices, would necessarily make a difference either, but it is fun to speculate on. I know there's been some work recently to show that purely physical laws could come up with ways to get, and forget, information, and could be seen as a type of life. The question then becomes whether that path could produce complex enough structures to get to the point where this could move beyond storing the simplest of cause and effect relationships and get to a layered matrix of stem, lower brain, and higher brain functionality; each one adapted to help the one above. A matrix that creates absolute adaptability to any socially coordinated, experience retrieval coding scheme (language), devised so far (and remember, some of these are really, really, mother frigging hard).

That being stated, however, doesn't prevent us from at least sticking to the contention that meaning processors, however they are formed, and the meaning space they create, might very well be essential in keeping a physical reality going. And as to why this should be so, I also have to wonder what causes singularities in the first place. The word of God? Or is it something more to do with encapsulation itself.

This is why my philosophy page has "Containers of Containers" in its title. For me, the unbelievable ubiquitousness of objectification, across all aspects of the entirety, has always been fascinating, and essential in understanding the entirety. That and the swirling mess of fields interacting because of already encapsulated swirling fields of interaction. Whereupon new connections are made and a new objectifications created; a process that is much the same whether you are talking about physical space at any scale, or meaning space.

What we end up with, in any case, is the singular viewpoint a meaning processor gets from having objectification occur at all; separating the inner from the outer and creating an identity. A self, and a point of view; which is simply saying a frame of reference another way, which is essential if one wants to talk about Relativity at all. And isn't it just a lovely coincidence then that this meaning processor also provides Relativity with something to be relative to?

Whatever the case may be, what do you think?




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