The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm - Peter J. Carroll 2008

Illumination?

Throughout recorded human history some people have always sought some kind of transcendence in the idea of gods, or higher states of 'being' or in expectation of after death states in which they somehow achieve union with something far greater than themselves.

Mostly this has led to ghastly disaster here on earth.

Nevertheless such ideas stand as a tribute to the power of imagination and an insult to the theories of cybernetics. (At least one species of organism in this universe can imagine a greater state of complexity than it posses itself, even if it usually comes down to fantasies about bigger penises or greater destructive capabilities, or merely some elaborate excuses for burning a few enemies at the stake.)

This chapter seeks an Apophenia in the most despised of all the classical arguments for the existence of the gods, The Ontological Argument, which basically says that if we can imagine them, then they probably exist.

Part 1.

A Fifth Principle of Thermodynamics?

Note that a Zeroth law of thermodynamics got officially added for the sake of technical completeness, as the first one didn't seem quite fundamental enough on later reflection, so we can call any new one the fourth or fifth law according to taste.

The philosophically significant second law says that everything runs down towards increasing entropy. Energy dissipates, stuff just falls to pieces with time, it all ends up as an inactive soup of particles at the same temperature with nothing much happening.

Life on earth for example does not really depend on energy from the sun. It depends critically on the sun having a much higher temperature than the surrounding space. Life exists here because it exploits the energy difference between the sun and space. It absorbs the relatively high grade solar energy and excretes the lower grade heat back out to space in a more entropic form. If we had a uniformly warm sky instead of a generally cool sky with an intensely hot spot in it, then life could not exist.

Life here has developed ever more complex and exotic mechanisms for dissipating energy. Herbivores dissipate energy far more quickly than the plants they feed on, carnivores dissipate the energy of herbivores far faster than the herbivores do themselves. Humans dissipate energy at an astonishing rate. Not content with merely eating the plants and the herbivores and the carnivores they also dig up the remains of old plants and animals in the form of coal and oil and burn those as well. Recently they discovered that they could even burn the uranium bearing rocks forged in the death throes of the previous star in this part of the galaxy.

Life dissipates energy and develops ever more complex ways of doing it. It takes a huge area of sunlight absorbing vegetation to maintain a vast number of insects to keep a smallish number of rodents and birds in business, just so that a single family of hawks or eagles can exist.

The second law of thermodynamics perhaps lacks global or cosmic applicability in two important ways. In Biology it fails to account for a tendency towards increasingly efficient and baroque forms of energy dissipation. The definition of entropy remains far from robust, and the relationship between entropy and the amount of information or sophistication in a system remains questionable. Stephen Hawking brilliantly observed that entropy increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which entropy increases.¹⁵ Thus the second law of thermodynamics constitutes a tautology.

Some theorists have tentatively proposed, as a sort of extra law of thermodynamics, that 'Energy dissipating structures will naturally tend towards more efficiency and complexity wherever possible', mainly on the grounds that they already appear to have done so in evolution here on earth.

On the cosmic scale, entropy may not necessarily constitute the inevitable fate of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics works well enough for steam engines where chemical and kinetic phenomena dominate, but on the larger scale other forces prevail. Gravitation and nuclear forces may well recycle the thermonuclear ash of the heavier elements back into primeval hydrogen when stars collapse. Black Holes and spacetime singularities represent a sort of entropy rich dead end in the evolution of the universe, but I suspect that either neutron annihilation or the constraints of lightspeed orbital velocity prevent them from forming in reality.

Part 2.

What Can Have Evolved?

Although the universe may have an 11 billion-year temporal horizon, you can go around the temporal curvature as many times as you like, if you have the technology and the will to survive. Life thus effectively has, and has had, unlimited time at its disposal.

If some kind of extra law of thermodynamics does favour the evolution of increasing sophistication and complexity of life in the universe, then it follows that the most sophisticated intelligences that this universe can possibly support must already exist, and probably in very large numbers.

Part 3.

Science Fiction Gods

Do they take much of an interest in us? I doubt it. How much entertainment does an ant's nest provide you with?

'Adepticus Sir, that bunch of Ornithoids on Arctos 4 that you asked me to observe, well they've just trashed their planet'.

'Oh that is a pity Initiatus Jones. What was it this time, ecological screw up or nuclear winter?

'Worse than that Sir, it looks like they were mucking around with vacuum energy without having first invented the Mobius sphere'

'Ah yes, the old classic mistake, we loose a few like that'

'Could we not have tipped them off about it Sir?'

'I'm afraid not Jones, stupidity must remain its own reward, it's regrettable but there you are, did you salvage anything?'

'They composed some fairly good poetry a couple of centuries ago, and some rather fine cloud sculptures fairly recently, I've logged some records in the archives'.

'Splendid Jones, I'll peruse them this evening. What about those Apes on Sol 3, how are they getting on?

'Quite a bit of warfare as usual Sir, mostly based on chemical explosives these days, but with the occasional use of plutonium. Many of them have developed a belief in a big bang theory, and they reckon that they have the maths to prove it'

'Really? Smith in anthropology will probably find that hilarious, I'm sure she would appreciate the data. It was one of her old stomping grounds you know'.

'No I didn't know that Sir'

'It was a long time ago Jones, and bit of a fiasco actually, she gave them a piece of her mind about some of their barbaric behaviour which then abruptly became worse. Ever since then they have been obsessed with the number plate on her craft, it read JHVH. The department gave her a desk job after that.'

Many 'ifs' surround the whole question of intelligent life in the universe but only one of those 'ifs' really counts.

If the physics of this universe absolutely prevents communication or travel between star systems, then it does not matter how much intelligent life exists, it can never affect us, and we shall eventually become extinct when our star starts getting low on fuel.

On the other hand if intelligent life can break free of the star systems in which it develops, then the universe must swarm with intelligent organisms. Life went into a bit of a funk here on earth for hundreds of millions of years as massive reptiles plodded about doing nothing very interesting for a very long time. Intelligence only has a history of a half a million years or so here. On other worlds dumb slugs may still gnaw the vegetation billions of years down the line, but if intelligence develops on only a minuscule fraction of worlds, then the universe must still contain a vast and varied resource of it. Statistically, a fair amount of it must have far greater abilities than we have yet.

Do highly evolved life forms take much interest in less advanced life forms such as us? Well we cannot know their motivations, but curiosity seems an indispensable attribute of intelligence, so would we seem interesting enough to warrant their attention? I very much doubt that any of our science and technology would interest them in the slightest. If they have the capacity to come here, or to examine us remotely, then all of our technology would seem laughably primitive to them.

Perhaps some of them might have an interest in our cultural activities for academic or entertainment purposes. Maybe some like watching primitive battles or our attempts at art or magic, perhaps their anthropologists find our attempts at religion an hilarious reminder of their own culture's long distant foibles and delusions.

Do they ever intervene in the development or survival of less advanced species? I would suspect that in general they avoid doing so. If we interest them in any way at all, we would become less interesting the more they interfered.

Nevertheless it remains possible that highly developed intelligences of extra-terrestrial origin do sometimes take an interest in the activities of humans. Maybe on very rare occasions they do intervene, but perhaps only with the same sort of random whimsy that you or I might move a snail with a particularly attractive shell off the pavement onto someone's front lawn.

It seems highly probable that highly advanced intelligences have already evolved in the universe. It seems unlikely that they will offer us much help here on this little ball of rock, and more likely that they want to see what we can make of ourselves by our own efforts.

Let us not disappoint them, or ourselves.

Part 4.

A Panpsychic Universe?

At the time of writing, quantum-cosmology looks like a grotesque mess.¹⁹, ²⁰

We cannot specify why the observed physical laws and constants take the form and the values that they do. We understand many of the laws of the universe but we have no idea why they exist.

If the various constants like the relative masses and charges of fundamental particles had even fractionally different values then life would not exist in the universe. Stars would either not form or they would burn too quickly and the rich chemistry which supports life would not happen with any other conceivable combination of values.

We seem to inhabit a 'Goldilocks Universe', not too hot and not too cold, and replete with the perfect chemical porridge to support life.

This has led some theorists to assert an Anthropic Principle which basically states that the universe looks precisely like this because if it didn't, we wouldn't exist to remark upon the fact. That at least seems unarguable.

Yet the inability of conventional physics to specify any reasons for the existence of this particular set of prevailing laws and constants has led to some highly dubious speculation about a meta-universe or 'Multiverse' of which this observed one forms only a microscopic fragment.

In some Multiverse hypotheses new universes can somehow become created from black holes within existing universes. Black holes supposedly collapse into singularities which erupt 'somewhere else' as big bangs which then initiate new universes with randomly selected new laws and constants Thus the number of universes tends to multiply hugely with time and perhaps some kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest universes applies, as some of them may collapse quickly or fail to form black holes to birth new universes. Alternatively, in simpler versions this universe periodically collapses in a big crunch and out of the resulting singularity a new universe explodes into existence in fresh big bang with a new suite of laws and constants. We just happen to live in one of the incredibly rare editions that can support life.

Such hypotheses have developed partly because String and Brane theories, which attempt to account for fundamental particles in terms of a spacetime geometry which has many extra small spatial dimensions, all yield fantastic numbers of possible answers, very few of which correspond to our observed reality.

Both versions of the Multiverse theory seem to severely violate the principle of Occam's razor in their attempt to merely account for the inability of theorists to specify reasons for the laws and constants of the universe we observe.

Singularities remain unproven, and if universes continually bud off daughter universes where does the mass and energy for their formation come from?

What meaning can the 'somewhere else' that these new universes supposedly manifest into possibly have? What keeps them gravitationally isolated from their mother universes?

A simpler solution may lie in applying General Metadynamics to the Fifth Principle of Thermodynamics and then adding Panpsychism.

Life then ensures the conditions for its own development in a single universe.

In this model only one universe actually exists, and it inevitably contains life because circular time and retroactive causality allows life to select the conditions in which it can exist. Thus in a very real sense we would all comprise the 'God' that specifies the universe. Atoms and molecules and phenomena with a simple structure presumably make a small contribution to it, perhaps we make a larger contribution but we should not delude ourselves with ideas of omnipotence here, because the universe probably contains more sentient races than individual humans.

A Panpsychic Universe would represent a collective effort by the entire Mind behaviour within it.

Water, Air, Earth, Fire, 'Spirit'?

Well at least that conforms to Eris' Iron Law of Fives.²¹

This perhaps explains the astonishing diversity of the universe's contents and phenomena, including the unpleasant bits.

Some guises of the Muse,

The Chaomeras

Pareidolia, Apophenia, and Eris.

Three Wyrd Sisters of Chaos,

Pareidolia making augury from entrails,

Apophenia seeking mysterious connections,

Eris disordering our carefully crafted expectations.