// April 6th, 2008 // 8 Comments » // Thoughts
This has been written so much more eloquently elsewhere, but I just want to get this out.
This world, this existence, indeed the entire thing we call reality is beautiful. On every scale wonderful things are happening. Fascinating things that boggle the mind. We exist on the lower end of this scale of scales, experiencing the world in meters, and here we see beautifully intricate and emergent patterns everywhere. From fairly simple rules we get to see shapes of tremendous apparent complexity, such as the arrangement of leaves on a fern or the golden ratio expressed in the spiral of a seashell, or the self-organizational properties of animal cultures. We see the swarming nature of flocks of birds, the ultimate efficiency of a trail of ants, even the selfish nature of a world of humans has led to so many examples of this wondrous self-organization, a la The Wealth of Networks and Six Degrees and the like.
From here we can go up or down the scale and see similarly amazing things. The point here is that at every scale, there is a vast diversity of structures and interactions, and they all follow certain rules that themselves are vast yet connected. They are consistent, understandable. It is obvious that this universe of ours hangs on these rules, exists necessarily because of these rules. It hurts my brain to try to imagine the magnitude of this universe. These rules that have allowed the path from quarks to atoms to cells exist everywhere! Not just here, on this planet at this point in time. It’s not terribly difficult to extract this out to the rest of the solar system, but imagining the true distance of things beyond that is actually pretty tough. The scale between the size of an atom and the size of a human body, that’s the sort of scale between the distance between that human body and the sun, and the sun and other heavenly bodies.
So here we have all these things, all these beautiful rules and patterns that have allowed growth, that have introduced what we almost arbitrarily call life, that have led to what we almost arbitrarily call intelligence. These things, too, follow rules. We have genes that replicate, and replication being an imperfect process (in that it doesn’t copy 100% accurately 100% of the time), we get mutations. It is through these mutations that animals change gradually over the course of millennia. (There’s also a social aspect that influences this as well, which harks back to my comments on the beauty of self-organization, but that’s another tangent from which I’ll try to refrain for now.) Naturally from these mutations, from these changing animals, we get this thing called evolution. And at this snapshot in time, somewhere between primordial ooze and who-knows-what’s-to-come, there lies a species better able to communicate itself than any species before it. Here we are, with big heavy brains, those brains doing what brains do: accepting raw sensory input and fleshing out patterns, plugging it into a constant simulation of the world, modifying that simulation as needed, and allowing us to interact. Somewhere in that simulation is a representation of Self, and a realization that there are others with the same representation of Self inside them. It’s through this self referencing that we become what’s called “conscious,” all thanks to these relatively simple rules of nature itself.
Considering all this, considering everything that the laws of nature inevitably allow and lead to, it’s strange to think that this historically new thing called “consciousness” can come up with ideas that totally undermine the wonder of nature. It seems an insult to Nature itself to wash it all away with the idea of God, a concept that came into existence at a time when the rules of nature were completely inaccessible to an ancient, lesser people. With God, man is able to completely ignore the vastness of this universe and place himself squarely in the center, where this god has for some reason decided to focus all his love and attention, and is apparently able to completely ignore the laws of this universe to just plop down spankin’ new animals that mysteriously share so many similarities with other unrelated animals. This, of course, is the meaning of faith, as it completely violates all common sense from a scientific standpoint. Instead of rules of nature that apply everywhere, God gives us an arbitrary being, a fickle experimenter. While I’m the center of my own little universe, I am capable of understanding full well that I mean just as much to this incomprehensibly vast universe as a chunk of rock hurtling from one galaxy to another. What doesn’t fit into the tidy laws of nature is the idea that I’m special in any natural or supernatural sense. That is the sole domain of a self-obsessed mind that allows delusions of God to control it.
I’ll craft this later. But for now, the wondrous laws of this thing called reality that ultimately have led to the existence of me, have also led to the constant mining of chemical resources, allocated all of them to necessary part of my body, and supplies are running low. I’m hungry and shall now go eat.
