The universe is striving toward a goal

The universe leverages causal openings in micro physical laws to move toward complexity, life, consciousness... Quality?

Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!

I haven’t been feeling so well for a few days so I decided to rest for a full week.

Perhaps others would feel guilty for not being doing this or that instead of resting, but I’m wiser than that. Rest is important, and sleep is important. You can’t function without resting and sleeping, so don’t even try. Feel free to rest when you need rest, enjoy your resting time, and think that you’ll do much more (and enjoy it much more) after resting.

Some format changes: I will only post one public newsletter per week with a roundup of whatever is on my mind. I will post longer stand-alone essays in turingchurch.net now and then, with links and excerpts in this newsletter. I will try to publish one or two public podcast episode(s) per month. Besides, there will be occasional newsletter / podcast issues reserved to paid subscribers.

I will use the space in the title and subtitle instead of wasting it. So no generic titles like “Turing Church newsletter 10/24/2021” but specific titles and subtitles related to the content.

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A very interesting discussion on Twitter:

Kevin Mitchell @WiringTheBrain

Is there any good work on the idea that some physical indeterminacy in the world is necessary for truly complex systems (including living organisms) to emerge?

Mitchell is the author of “Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are” and has a very interesting new book in preparation:

Kevin Mitchell @WiringTheBrain

Next up - Chapter Seven: "But, physics..." - in which I will argue that determinism is false, the lowest levels are not necessarily the most "fundamental", indeterminacy creates causal slack for macroscopic causation, and nothing in physics rules out free will 😊

I look forward to reading this book, which Mitchell says will come out “sometime in 2022.” I tend to agree with Mitchell’s views:

Giulio Prisco @giulioprisco

@JonNichEdwards @BobbyAzarian @GaneshNatesh @WiringTheBrain @seanmcarroll @karlbykarlsmith @clamchup That there's nothing supernatural in nature is evident if you define nature as all that exists. But nature can still be much more complex than our current models and metaphors.

Giulio Prisco @giulioprisco

@JonNichEdwards @BobbyAzarian @GaneshNatesh @WiringTheBrain @seanmcarroll @karlbykarlsmith @clamchup So you want to understand the complexity of nature better but using only the simple reductionist concepts of 19th century science, without using more complex concepts? Good luck with that.

Giulio Prisco @giulioprisco

@BobbyAzarian @JonNichEdwards @GaneshNatesh @WiringTheBrain @seanmcarroll @karlbykarlsmith @clamchup My take: micro (local, reductionist) laws are not causally closed, so there’s room for macro laws to operate. Nothing mysterious or supernatural here, just the way nature works. Reductionism can’t explain everything, but new science will explain more things.

I elaborate in my book “Tales of the Turing Church” and these essays written after the publication of the book:

• Fake/real free will and consciousness in cellular automata universes

• Downward, backward, teleological causation and divine action

I will further elaborate in my next book.

That the universe leverages causal openings in micro physical laws to move toward a goal is suggested more and more frequently. According to Thomas Nagel, high level teleological laws pull the universe toward complexity, life, and consciousness.

Don’t try to visualize how this “works,” because any mental image that you can visualize would push you back into reductionism. Just think of vast nonlocal networks of choice events all over space and time that somehow orchestrate the evolution of the whole universe toward its goal.

I haven’t mentioned (a) creator God(s), and there’s no need to. But I think that, striving toward its goal, the universe generates hierarchies of God-like beings. Advanced natural Gods are not limited by space and time, and act across space and time. So they participate in orchestrating the evolution of the universe from its very beginnings in time.

Thinking of a more general name for the goal of the universe, I have long suspected that perhaps the undefined and undefinable Good - or “Quality” - of Robert Pirsig is a good name. In many writings Pirsig seems to suggest that the universe is striving toward Quality. I’ll do a few days of total immersion in the world of Pirsig (which is always a pleasure: Pirsig is one of my heroes) to find the best references and quotes, and report back next week.

Cover picture from Wikimedia Commons.