# Why is our universe so good at organizing itself. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 11, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450 "2014-03-11T16:18:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/21 "2014-03-11T18:02:41Z")
> [@Glazer](#): > > Conscousness itself is an emergent phenomenon of the interaction of neurons in the brain. Complexity upon complexity builds our universe. Fair enough, and my thoughts as well. Consciousness is like the music emerging from plucking the strings on a guitar. The creepy thing, is the “instrument” seems to be playing its own music. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/22 "2014-03-11T19:05:08Z")
> [@Farin](#): > > No. Think of it in terms of infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare. At some point, the chaos will look like order. It doesn’t mean the piece that looks like order is no longer a part of the chaos. But for anything reasonably complex to emerge in this way would take, like, _forever_. More to the point, it’s looking at the wrong end: assuming that what you have to generate is the entire universe as it stands. Most processes don’t work that way. Rather, they build stuff up from other stuff—they generate output from inputs. Trying to randomly create the output will typically stand a much smaller chance than trying to create the input that produces it (in all cases in which the output is not perfectly random, in fact). And it’s such generative processes you should be looking at: things that turn a comparatively simple input into a complex output. And as it turns out, such processes aren’t rare: even within the simplest sorts of processes you could imagine—say, those given by [one-dimensional cellular automata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_cellular_automaton)—you find some that can produce complexity equivalent to anything imaginable: they’re computationally universal, and thus, capable of emulating any process that can be simulated on a computer, including of course any given computer. Among the 256 elementary cellular automata, 88 are inequivalent under operations such as mirroring and complementation, and of those, one (Rule 110) is known to be computationally universal, and at least one other is strongly suspected to be (Rule 54). So that’s a likelihood of hitting something complex of around 2%, certainly much better than trying to randomly create Shakespeare. (And the likelihood increases once you go to more complex systems.) So, you shouldn’t have your apes hack into a word processor, but rather, into a compiler—the odds of finding a program that shows ‘interesting’ behaviour are much more in your favour. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/23 "2014-03-11T19:18:50Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > But for anything reasonably complex to emerge in this way would take, like, _forever_. More to the point, it’s looking at the wrong end: assuming that what you have to generate is the entire universe as it stands. Most processes don’t work that way. Rather, they build stuff up from other stuff—they generate output from inputs. Trying to randomly create the output will typically stand a much smaller chance than trying to create the input that produces it (in all cases in which the output is not perfectly random, in fact). > > And it’s such generative processes you should be looking at: things that turn a comparatively simple input into a complex output. And as it turns out, such processes aren’t rare: even within the simplest sorts of processes you could imagine—say, those given by [one-dimensional cellular automata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_cellular_automaton)—you find some that can produce complexity equivalent to anything imaginable: they’re computationally universal, and thus, capable of emulating any process that can be simulated on a computer, including of course any given computer. > > Among the 256 elementary cellular automata, 88 are inequivalent under operations such as mirroring and complementation, and of those, one (Rule 110) is known to be computationally universal, and at least one other is strongly suspected to be (Rule 54). So that’s a likelihood of hitting something complex of around 2%, certainly much better than trying to randomly create Shakespeare. (And the likelihood increases once you go to more complex systems.) > > So, you shouldn’t have your apes hack into a word processor, but rather, into a compiler—the odds of finding a program that shows ‘interesting’ behaviour are much more in your favour. Not sure I’m phrasing this right, but this brings us around to the growing theory that information is an intrinsic part of thermodynamics (I usually think of the holographic principle on the surface of event horizons here). Bringing up a binary correlation of cellular complexity in mathematics/computing is interesting. Is there a physical force in nature that might be equivalent? ---
**Author:** ![ThisUsernameIsForbidden](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b4bc9f/32.png) [@ThisUsernameIsForbidden](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisUsernameIsForbidden)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/24 "2014-03-11T20:24:57Z")
Any that don’t don’t last very long. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/25 "2014-03-11T20:37:50Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > And I understand all of this. Chemistry being largely nuclear and electromagnetic on the fundamental, it is one of my greater loves in the spectrum of science. But there is nothing in chemistry, besides the fact of biology, that points to why this is or is not necessarily an intrinsic property of chemistry. > > And if it is, could this be an argument for the likelihood that the universe it teeming with life of all kinds? I don’t know what being “an intrinsic property of chemistry” is. We know that self-replicating molecules exist, and we know they do so by chemical, not supernatural, principles. I don’t think we know how hard it is to get the first one, and that determines in no small part if life is common or not. Biology could be viewed as the study of what evolves from these first molecules. But I’d not be surprised if some biologists object to this definition. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/26 "2014-03-11T20:44:28Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Natural Selection is a great point. And you state the argument eloquently. > > But where did heredity arise from? What in atomic and molecular bonds encourage this? But heredity is fundamental. The Dawkins view, remember, is that all life is a way of letting self-replicating molecules replicate better and faster. We may think it is about us, but it is really about our DNA. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/27 "2014-03-11T20:48:56Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > What I find the most fascinating is that unlike the weather, and/or emergent ripples or patterns in sand dunes driven by the wind, out of life came conscousness. True, but it really seems to have come from feedback in a complex brain. Has the answer to a difficult problem ever just come to you? Damon Knight wrote about his subconscious, who he named Fred, who solved his writing problems. Mine writes very nice segments of code. That’s an example of intelligence without consciousness. When I think about how my dog reasons, and she does, that is the model I use. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/28 "2014-03-11T21:55:53Z")
Which is all the more fascinating and curious; I’ve always thought DNA being the interface between chemistry and biology. There’s some eye-of-the-needle, or singularity if you will, that matter passes through to go from non-living to living back to non-living again—Not unlike what happens to matter and its information as it crosses the event horizon of a black hole. Is there some “event horizon” for life? Something at work in the fabric of nature insisting on replication, heredity, etc.? Why didn’t the universe just stop at rocky worlds, gassy planets, and inert matter? The fact that patterns form, strange loops emerge, and the stuff of the universe can ponder itself is an astounding realization. But is this the wrong perspective? A biased one? ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2014, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/29 "2014-03-11T23:04:19Z")
Stuart Kauffman wrote a book a decade or two back called “At Home in the Universe”, in which he laid out some pretty elegant arguments drawing from chaos theory and simple simulations to show that the emergence of lifelike patterns from a chaotic system may not be wildly improbably, but might perhaps be an inevitable tendency. That is, he could start a system at some distance into pure chaos and watch as it naturally tended towards the phase change between chaos and order that seems to characterize life. It’s well worth reading. I don’t know if there are more modern works that continue this train of thought. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/30 "2014-03-12T00:11:34Z")
Thanks **Smeg,** I might take a look at it. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/31 "2014-03-12T01:01:14Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Which is all the more fascinating and curious; I’ve always thought DNA being the interface between chemistry and biology. There’s some eye-of-the-needle, or singularity if you will, that matter passes through to go from non-living to living back to non-living again—Not unlike what happens to matter and its information as it crosses the event horizon of a black hole. > > Is there some “event horizon” for life? Something at work in the fabric of nature insisting on replication, heredity, etc.? Look at the virus. It is usually considered to be non-living, yet it reproduces, mutates and evolves. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/32 "2014-03-12T01:19:34Z")
Forgive me for quoting something I find wonderful and remarkable: “The flow of energy through a system tends to organize that system.” Harold J. Morowitz. Wind blows randomly over sand…and you get highly ordered fields of sand dunes. We get the highly ordered waves, marching in to crash on the beach. We get beaches of sand, and rivers full of smooth, rounded cobblestones. As noted above, the energy cost is paid by the sun. (Okay, and, yes, vulcanism and tidal energy. Even starlight plays its part.) ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/33 "2014-03-12T15:44:39Z")
I guess I have a problem with the premise. A completely lifeless world is quite orderly. A world with diverse life is more disorderly. Are we sure that the rise of life was a reverse of entropy? ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/34 "2014-03-12T15:59:12Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Which is all the more fascinating and curious; I’ve always thought DNA being the interface between chemistry and biology. There’s some eye-of-the-needle, or singularity if you will, that matter passes through to go from non-living to living back to non-living again—Not unlike what happens to matter and its information as it crosses the event horizon of a black hole. > > Is there some “event horizon” for life? Something at work in the fabric of nature insisting on replication, heredity, etc.? > > Why didn’t the universe just stop at rocky worlds, gassy planets, and inert matter? The fact that patterns form, strange loops emerge, and the stuff of the universe can ponder itself is an astounding realization. But is this the wrong perspective? A biased one? The only thing that favors replication is stability. Of all the billions of molecules that have been randomly formed over time, the only ones that are still here today are either 1) very stable 2) continuing to be formed or 3) darn, you blinked and you just missed it. So we have things like H20, CO2 and granite almost everywhere because they’re remarkably stable combinations of common elements. Something like atmopsheric oxygen is only going to exist in a system where something keeps replenishing it because it’s not stable enough. You would not have stable blobs of amino acids, sugars and nucleic acids, except in the case that they are self-replicating. So… I think your observation is mostly confirmation bias, especially when Earth shows only one class of self-replicating compounds. No matter where we look on Earth, there we are already. (Using we in the broadest sense of our type of life.) ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/35 "2014-03-12T16:58:35Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > I guess I have a problem with the premise. A completely lifeless world is quite orderly. A world with diverse life is more disorderly. Are we sure that the rise of life was a reverse of entropy? Life, as an extension of nature, will increase entropy in its environment. But life itself seems to be called an emergent phenomenon of very low entropy, when you look at something like our bodies or brain structure. Also, a completely lifeless world does have an arbitrary amount of entropy, however there’s nothing that would be “artificially” selective about lowering localized entropy, like a bird building a nest, or a man building a dam. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/36 "2014-03-12T16:59:54Z")
> [@Glazer](#): > > What you are looking for is Complexity Theory and the Emergence Principal. Check out the work coming out of The Santa Fe Institute. Complexity is still a very new area of scienctific study. No formal theory as yet. They are still trying to define exactly just what complexity and emergence are. Kind of like porn, hard to define but easy to spot when you see it. Would that be [these guys](http://phys.org/news/2012-12-life-inevitable-paper-pieces-metabolism.html)? Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, wrote an article claiming that life is inevitable because it[dissipates heat](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/22/physicist-says-hes-solved-the-big-mystery-how-life-came-from-matter-and-he-may-be-right/). It was reported early this year. Not sure if we’d hear if there had been refutations. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/37 "2014-03-12T17:18:29Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Forgive me for quoting something I find wonderful and remarkable: “The flow of energy through a system tends to organize that system.” Harold J. Morowitz. > > (…snip) It’s an elegant idea, and seems almost universally true. I can imagine a lightning strike in the primordial ooze and through electric charge molecules align, as an old proposal for abiogenesis suggests. And as stated, we only have very reactive chemicals around us, because plants “exhale” oxygen. Men extract crude oil from ancient, fossilized jungles. But looking on the other side of things, energy through a system also seems to want to equalize or neutralize that system (e.g. O2 bonding with iron causing rust), rendering it inert as far as chemical reaction is concerned… except with life. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/38 "2014-03-12T17:35:36Z")
Or, perhaps, it’s through _entropy_ a system tends toward the inert. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/39 "2014-03-12T20:36:14Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > . . . But looking on the other side of things, energy through a system also seems to want to equalize or neutralize that system (e.g. O2 bonding with iron causing rust), rendering it inert as far as chemical reaction is concerned… except with life. That’s the brilliance and vast explanatory power of Darwinian evolution: once life got started, it changed in ways that promoted its own survival. Very early life-forms and pre-life forms – raw RNA molecules, for instance – didn’t have the incredible self-regulatory power that cellular life enjoys today. It arose out of variations, and perpetuated because it promotes survival. Once you get the first set of molecules that can reproduce with variations, there aren’t many limits left. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2014, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450/40 "2014-03-12T22:30:04Z")
It’s been many years since I read it, but Jeremy Campbell’s [Grammatical Man](http://www.amazon.com/GRAMMATICAL-MAN-Information-Entropy-Language-ebook/dp/B008XJ8O4E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394662491&sr=1-1&keywords=grammatical+man&tag=donations09-20) addresses exactly the questions you pose in the OP: Why do systems of order arise despite the ostensibly irresistible effect of entropy? Does the Universe have ‘organizing forces’, etc.? You can read the first chapter (at least) for free at the Amazon site if you have a Kindle. Worth a look. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-our-universe-so-good-at-organizing-itself/683450.md?page=3)