Intelligent evolution

[fathomlessness]

Evolution is no more intelligent than the formation of ordered crystal structures in your freeze precipitation dish. Random events (e.g. mutations) allow the exploration of possibility space, and the environment ruthlessly evaluates the fitness of those possibilities.

I really like this explanation. It's kinda poetic.

How did this process of genetic variation evolve itself in the universe that was filled with hydrogen and helium atoms post Big Bang? How has it ended up in a wide variety of conscious beings, from bacteria to lions to humans?

This echoes my thoughts, if I'm understanding you correctly.

If evolution operates according to the parameters of some sort of algorithm, as a random process of natural selection, what is the driving force of the algorithm? I want to refrain from eluding to a "programmer" or something that implies a conscious "creator" - but what is it that allows the process to exist in the first place? What gives it shape and "moves" it through time? And is it measurable?

It's an emergent property set by the boundary conditions of The Universe.

I like to think about formal logic as an example: if you create an axiomatic system, certain patterns and relationships provably *must* emerge. They are not 'created,' but rather they are discovered, and must exist as soon as the system is formed, even if no one has ever seen them, spoken about them, or knows that they exist.

Evolution is the same way (note: I'm referring to evolution as a process, rather than any specific output, such as humans or birds or something). As soon as we had a universe in which increasing complexity was possible, evolution was all but ensured, so long as the right conditions were met.

You could ask yourself 'well how did we get there,' but at that point, you're basically asking 'why the Big Bang?'

Blessings
~ND

We know evolution is an emergent phenomena of the universe just like formal logic is of rational minds but this says nothing of the sheer improbability that evolution should arise nor does it explain how matter should just organize itself to form organisms. Like saying consciousness is an emergent phenomena of the brain doesn't explain how it is so.

 

[fathomlessness]

Basically, it seems like we live in a "Goldilocks Universe" where the conditions are perfect to harbour life, but how life got to this point seems statistically impossible and extraordinary.

Yes, which is sort of what makes me feel that I should be considering radical notions like simulation theory, solipsism or that our conceptions of the universe are way off due to information being obscured by being limited to a finite biological computer locked in 3 dimensions and that physical matter interacts more prominently with higher dimensions of space which give rise to unlikely events like life and the big bang. I imagined though that if we could explain how cells came to exist and knew that the probability of it being so was very large (very likely to exist), then I wouldn't be so skeptical, nor would I have warrant to be skeptical or rationally consider extremist theories like those I mentioned above.

To follow up on what EG said about our relation to the cosmos as participants. Are we here as the universes' bitch in a way? Does the universe need an observer to exist outside of a superposition-like state? Maybe that's our purpose as conscious beings.

I like that idea, it makes humans out to be important and special rather than just some low-lying bacterium-like pieces of flesh rotting on a rock ball thinking they understand what is going on and what their worth is in an otherwise absurd universe that doesn't need them at all.

I also like the low-entropy multiverse theory, where we were always going to live in a place so finely tuned for life and that we can potentially "see" the fingerprints of alternate universes through string-like vibrations within atoms.

I thought you were going to say "I also like the low-entropy multiverse theory, where we were always going to live in a place so finely tuned for life and that we can potentially "see" the fingerprints of alternate universes through mushrooms."