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> mustn't this in turn depend on some pre-existing regularity Consider the set of all things, including the ordered and disordered. Consider the operation of t

> mustn't this in turn depend on some pre-existing regularity Consider the set of all things, including the ordered and disordered. Consider the operation of taking subsets of that set. Consider that conscious entities such as us only arise in ordered subsets (for some definition of ordered). Those conscious entities would see their proximal environment as ordered. They might assume that the only things in the set of all things are those things that are ordered in the same way as the proximal environment from which they arose. Our universe may be just a subset of a subset. That is, our universe might be one kind of universe that has some apparent quantum-field or relativity-geometry based regularity. There might be some number of universes that share that kind of ordering and perhaps not in all of them conscious entities arise. It is still an interesting question to ask: why would conscious entities arise within this particular kind of ordered universe? But it no longer remains the question of whether or not regularity is a fundamental property of all possible states of existence. And in fact it leaves open the question as to whether or not some kind of consciousness (perhaps very different from our own) could arise in what would appear to us as chaotic universes.

smokel 3y ago
I spent quite some time thinking along these lines, but then I realized that it is very unlikely to be the case in our universe. If our world would be an "accidental" subset of the universe, with ordering, then how can it be that this ordering is so consistent? Would it not be more likely that we'd live in a world that has only some order, or varying order depending on one's position in space and time? For example, I would expect a lot more miracles to happen, but every physics experiment turns out to be extremely consistent. This led me to believe that there is another process at play. My thought experiment now assumes that observation enforces a certain kind of consistency in the laws of physics. That is, the systems that we use to observe something, must by their very existence result in very consistent patterns in the chaos. What this precisely looks like and how it operates is left as an exercise to the reader.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  > observation enforces a certain kind of consistency in the laws of physics. That sounds like a typical chicken-and-egg problem. > how can it be that this ordering is so consistent? One thing that I didn't explicitly state is that the universe only needs to seem ordered. You are making an assumption that isn't necessarily founded. 99.9% of the time we aren't checking on the ordered state of the universe. It is the exceedingly rare case that we measure with sufficient granularity to expect to see quantum effect, for example. > I would expect a lot more miracles to happen I totally understand this. You might expect a table upon which your keyboard rests to change color as we pass through a chaotic portion of some multi-verse. But that assumes order can't exist at the time-scales of universes. Imagine it like a picture. The set of all possible pictures at 640x480 is massive but finite. The vast majority of images in that space are like white noise. But you've probably seen millions of images at that resolution that are totally coherent. You don't expect the middle block of some specific image to randomly be a different color. Same with a movie. The set of all sequences of 640x480 images at 30 fps with 1 minute duration is finite. It is full of total chaos. But when you watch a movie you don't expect chaos to ensue at any moment. If you consider our entire universe like a single image from the set of all images or a movie from the set of all movies, it isn't surprising that it is entirely ordered from beginning to end. It just feels weird because the scale in both time and space is so large in the case of the universe. But given the scale of the entire set, such a large subset having internal consistency isn't totally unreasonable.
  - californical 3y ago
    I don’t have anything to add, but I just genuinely love your analogy. Totally helped me see the idea in a different way

smokel 3y ago

I spent quite some time thinking along these lines, but then I realized that it is very unlikely to be the case in our universe. If our world would be an "accidental" subset of the universe, with ordering, then how can it be that this ordering is so consistent? Would it not be more likely that we'd live in a world that has only some order, or varying order depending on one's position in space and time? For example, I would expect a lot more miracles to happen, but every physics experiment turns out to be extremely consistent. This led me to believe that there is another process at play. My thought experiment now assumes that observation enforces a certain kind of consistency in the laws of physics. That is, the systems that we use to observe something, must by their very existence result in very consistent patterns in the chaos. What this precisely looks like and how it operates is left as an exercise to the reader.

zoogeny 3y ago
> observation enforces a certain kind of consistency in the laws of physics. That sounds like a typical chicken-and-egg problem. > how can it be that this ordering is so consistent? One thing that I didn't explicitly state is that the universe only needs to seem ordered. You are making an assumption that isn't necessarily founded. 99.9% of the time we aren't checking on the ordered state of the universe. It is the exceedingly rare case that we measure with sufficient granularity to expect to see quantum effect, for example. > I would expect a lot more miracles to happen I totally understand this. You might expect a table upon which your keyboard rests to change color as we pass through a chaotic portion of some multi-verse. But that assumes order can't exist at the time-scales of universes. Imagine it like a picture. The set of all possible pictures at 640x480 is massive but finite. The vast majority of images in that space are like white noise. But you've probably seen millions of images at that resolution that are totally coherent. You don't expect the middle block of some specific image to randomly be a different color. Same with a movie. The set of all sequences of 640x480 images at 30 fps with 1 minute duration is finite. It is full of total chaos. But when you watch a movie you don't expect chaos to ensue at any moment. If you consider our entire universe like a single image from the set of all images or a movie from the set of all movies, it isn't surprising that it is entirely ordered from beginning to end. It just feels weird because the scale in both time and space is so large in the case of the universe. But given the scale of the entire set, such a large subset having internal consistency isn't totally unreasonable.
- californical 3y ago
  I don’t have anything to add, but I just genuinely love your analogy. Totally helped me see the idea in a different way