If you had a 1000 monkeys, and typewriters, I think you would get a whole lot of broken typewriters with shit on them — Wayfarer
I think the puzzles you keep running into, Mike, come from an image of the lone organism, a person, struggling heroically against their environment. Now you've even taken to treating Life as if it were a single entity doing stuff like adapting and surviving. There's not a single rock falling down the well but trillions. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon. It's all about populations. — Srap Tasmaner
I have been thinking about this question lately as well. It's certainly one of the things that have been on my mind, especially with regards to philosophy.Order from Chaos — MikeL
I think repetition and pattern don't really get to the essence of order. Repetition and pattern are only one kind of order, more specifically the order that arises by having separate things arranged in such and such a way. But, essentially, order is a determination. This means that absolute disorder or absolute chaos must be impossible, for it entails the absence of any determination, and the absence of any determination is just non-being, nothing.There is order – repetition of pattern - mathematics to the response. — MikeL
Surely this "chaos" from which life arises cannot be absolute chaos, by the considerations that we mentioned before. Rather this "chaos" is a lower degree of order compared to the order that we call life.Life is an order of moleculo-chemical processes that arises out of chaos — MikeL
You see, for example this scenario presupposes that the monkeys will be typing in the first place. Something needs to constrain them, they should be typing, not smashing the keyboards, eating, etc. So even this simple system requires some kind of order for the works of Shakespeare to be produced.It is the case of the 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for a thousand years to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem of the evolution of life from molecules seems settled. — MikeL
Yes, agreed. Without a teleological end that directs occurences towards the production of increasing complexity and order this would be impossible.The problem with both of these analogies though is that order would fall back into chaos. It would not last. The next words the monkeys typed after typing Shakespeare would be gibberish. The harmony of the bells would continue to fall back into a discordant cacophony. — MikeL
Yes, the existence of this world does require an intelligence.Surely the evolution of complex life from such a perfectly formed base of molecular and then cellular interaction points to intelligent design. — MikeL
It is nothing but the preparation for the great darkness that is to befall the Western world. The West seems to be in the phase of its senility. It is too old, tired, and has lost all desire for life. This loss is expressed by the belief that everything is crapshot - otherwise you could not sleep well at night with who you are. But if everything is crapshot, that is now a justification for yourself.But the ideological commitment to the notion of the Universe being purposeless, is now intrinsic to the Western worldview, when it's not a scientiific hypothesis at all, and can't be. It's simply a mind set. — Wayfarer
when we look close enough, we find both chaos and order, — jorndoe
Sure, but you realise that this doesn't solve much of the problem. Namely, the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. The real question is why are things (the universe) such that statistically, they will tend towards the fastest dissipation of energy? To say because there is a law is nothing more than to say that opium causes sleep because it has sleep-inducing powers - a tautology. And even worse, because this isn't even a law, it's just a statistic.Apokrisis has been going around saying our impulse to order here is to dissipate heat, to increase entropy. At the molecular level, under certain stable conditions (an energy source, heat bath) matter orders itself to dissipate more energy and this puts the upward trend of evolution of matter into motion.
How much heat are you dissipating? — Nils Loc
Sure, but you realise that this doesn't solve much of the problem. — Agustino
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