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I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term

I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.

imchillyb 2y ago
So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random. Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this. Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it? Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.
- frabjoused 2y ago
  My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
- felizuno 2y ago
  I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP) Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
  - semi-extrinsic 2y ago
    Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around. A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
    - grvbck 2y ago
      > A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did. That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there be?"...
    - fsagx 2y ago
      52! even has its own website: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
    - Zitrax 2y ago
      I guess properly is important there, in reality certain initial orderings are more common and we use certain techniques for shuffling with our hands making it less random than "properly".
- samus 2y ago
  Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
- phito 2y ago
  Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span. That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.
  - caf 2y ago
    You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    "The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
    - conductr 2y ago
      It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles. But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
        conductr 2y ago
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others. Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo". > That doesn't seem random does it? Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
- ordu 2y ago
  If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly. But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Every part of the ecosystem, at any point in history, has co-evolved to be the state it is in - it's an intricate network all balanced to co-exist. If you change any part of the this ecosystem then the rest will have to adapt to the change, but evolutionary timescales are relatively long, and it's not going to settle down to where it was before. Whether you regard a new balance as simply that, or as the old balance being destroyed is just your choice of description. Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed random and continuously evolving, and there is no privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current state.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  Non-native species don't exist when you use long time scales and realize humans are species too. Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas is an interesting book on this topic.
feoren 2y ago
It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be, is, but it's random that you are you and I am me and we find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots to make sense of.
- kortilla 2y ago
  Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.
  - alonsonic 2y ago
    It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      That's only true if he's aware of it.
      - lazide 2y ago
        But we try to not talk about Cincinnati.
    - kortilla 2y ago
      No, bob doesn’t know he’s even being intentionally fucked with. There are many videos of this style of “prank” available on the internet.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    There is a lot of subtle meaning layered into that: Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to risk doing it publicly Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration of status, like children do more explicitly and often unconsciously in the schoolyard. Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a willingness to violate a taboo, be unempathetic, and therefore potentially dangerous Personal power: I'm powerful and independent enough to do something on a whim etc.
alok-g 2y ago
>> I think it's a big randomness +1. A big randomness, following the laws of Physics that are themselves possibly rooted in something. With that big randomness, by some chance, intelligent life has happened that can wonder. Where's more to be uncovered are in the laws of Physics (and why are they what they are), and thereby better matching the probabilities of the said randomness.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  I don't think there's any reason to believe that there can be an explanation for the laws of physics in this sense. Just like the laws of logic, they might just be.
  - alok-g 2y ago
    I agree. There's surely however more to uncover for Physics.
layer8 2y ago
Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having anything at all.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  I've always thought of it more as the logical consequence of having nothing, the need for there to be a something to oppose it.
  - alok-g 2y ago
    When they applied Heisenberg principle to vacuum to bring up zero point energy, Casimir force was found, etc., I understood thtis as the principle opposing nothingness.
codeulike 2y ago
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. - Douglas Adams
km144 2y ago
I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our field of observation or understanding. If something indeed created the universe or some definitive sequence of events spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is outside of the realm of our possible experiences. But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.
- smeej 2y ago
  I think this is why Christians posit that the Creator actually entered into humanity, so we could understand--or at least be as much less wrong in our speculations as we can handle, small as we are. They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or colloquially, "I'm the one who just is. I am being-itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Sure, but it is a meaningless take. It posits into existence this being with this property, when you can just as easily posit that the universe itself has this property.
    - smeej 2y ago
      But the universe can and does change. Something that is, in that most fundamental sense, does not also have potentiality. Anything that can change, that can be "other than it is," must have some potentiality un-actualized, must not fully "be," because there are some things it is not but could be (and, indeed, later will be).
      - 2y ago
veunes 2y ago
That's a deep thought! I think the idea of "meaning" is something we created to make sense of the world around us

imchillyb 2y ago

So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random. Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this. Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it? Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.

frabjoused 2y ago
My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
andsoitis 2y ago
> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
felizuno 2y ago
I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP) Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around. A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
  - grvbck 2y ago
    > A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did. That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there be?"...
  - fsagx 2y ago
    52! even has its own website: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
  - Zitrax 2y ago
    I guess properly is important there, in reality certain initial orderings are more common and we use certain techniques for shuffling with our hands making it less random than "properly".
samus 2y ago
Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
phito 2y ago
Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span. That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.
- caf 2y ago
  You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  "The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
  - conductr 2y ago
    It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles. But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
      - conductr 2y ago
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others. Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo". > That doesn't seem random does it? Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
ordu 2y ago
If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly. But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Every part of the ecosystem, at any point in history, has co-evolved to be the state it is in - it's an intricate network all balanced to co-exist. If you change any part of the this ecosystem then the rest will have to adapt to the change, but evolutionary timescales are relatively long, and it's not going to settle down to where it was before. Whether you regard a new balance as simply that, or as the old balance being destroyed is just your choice of description. Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed random and continuously evolving, and there is no privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current state.
SamPatt 2y ago
Non-native species don't exist when you use long time scales and realize humans are species too. Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas is an interesting book on this topic.

feoren 2y ago

It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be, is, but it's random that you are you and I am me and we find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots to make sense of.

kortilla 2y ago
Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.
- alonsonic 2y ago
  It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    That's only true if he's aware of it.
    - lazide 2y ago
      But we try to not talk about Cincinnati.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    No, bob doesn’t know he’s even being intentionally fucked with. There are many videos of this style of “prank” available on the internet.
- mmooss 2y ago
  There is a lot of subtle meaning layered into that: Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to risk doing it publicly Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration of status, like children do more explicitly and often unconsciously in the schoolyard. Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a willingness to violate a taboo, be unempathetic, and therefore potentially dangerous Personal power: I'm powerful and independent enough to do something on a whim etc.

alok-g 2y ago

>> I think it's a big randomness +1. A big randomness, following the laws of Physics that are themselves possibly rooted in something. With that big randomness, by some chance, intelligent life has happened that can wonder. Where's more to be uncovered are in the laws of Physics (and why are they what they are), and thereby better matching the probabilities of the said randomness.

tsimionescu 2y ago
I don't think there's any reason to believe that there can be an explanation for the laws of physics in this sense. Just like the laws of logic, they might just be.
- alok-g 2y ago
  I agree. There's surely however more to uncover for Physics.

layer8 2y ago

Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having anything at all.

AlecSchueler 2y ago
I've always thought of it more as the logical consequence of having nothing, the need for there to be a something to oppose it.
- alok-g 2y ago
  When they applied Heisenberg principle to vacuum to bring up zero point energy, Casimir force was found, etc., I understood thtis as the principle opposing nothingness.

codeulike 2y ago

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. - Douglas Adams

km144 2y ago

I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our field of observation or understanding. If something indeed created the universe or some definitive sequence of events spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is outside of the realm of our possible experiences. But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.

smeej 2y ago
I think this is why Christians posit that the Creator actually entered into humanity, so we could understand--or at least be as much less wrong in our speculations as we can handle, small as we are. They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or colloquially, "I'm the one who just is. I am being-itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Sure, but it is a meaningless take. It posits into existence this being with this property, when you can just as easily posit that the universe itself has this property.
  - smeej 2y ago
    But the universe can and does change. Something that is, in that most fundamental sense, does not also have potentiality. Anything that can change, that can be "other than it is," must have some potentiality un-actualized, must not fully "be," because there are some things it is not but could be (and, indeed, later will be).
    - 2y ago

veunes 2y ago

That's a deep thought! I think the idea of "meaning" is something we created to make sense of the world around us