The purpose would be to
> >>create a system which could be aware of and comprehend the universe.
This
> >>comprehension would result in the ability to create more, which is
another
> >>purpose.
Some snipping
>
> Chris
> The problem is that that theory is no improvement over pure ordinary
> naturalism.
>
I disagree. Naturalism has no direction. There may be similarities between
"survival of the fittest" and "increased capacity to create", but only the
second includes concious creation (art, music, inventing, etc) as a
direction which nature is moving towards. And pure naturalisim has nothing
to say of a system which comprehends the universe. I am suggesting, that
our intellegence and curiousity, our capacity for perceiving and creating
beauty, is not an accident of evolution, but the direction it was intended
to go.
>
> Chris
> Again, I don't see how it can be tested
Some predictions of the theory would be the very fast appearance of life as
soon as earth was capable of sustaining it. The direction of complexity
towards increasing awareness of the surrounding enviroment and increased
capacity to process that information. I even suggest a far out prediction,
that if we ever reach the stars, we will find that planets which have had
life for a certain amount of time will have sentient beings on them.
This theory is not uncomfortable with the place of conciousness in space and
time. Here is a little bit from Andrei Linde in an abstract from the
Science and the Spiritual Quest conference:
http://www.ssq.net/html/a-linde.html
"It suggests that there may be nothing beyond physics andtechnology in the
act of creation of the universe. But what if this picture istoo simplistic?
Is it possible that we are making a conceptual mistake at themoment when we
are making an obvious assumption that the material universe encompasses
everything? There is at least one place where this could happen. Inour
picture we completely ignored consciousness, by making the
standardassumption that it is merely a function of matter, so once we know
matter, weknow everything.
This assumption becomes less obvious when one considers quantum cosmology
and finds out that the notion of the evolution of the universe is directly
linkedto the possibility that the universe can be observed. Indeed, it can
berigorously proven that the wave function of the universe, which describes
theprobability of various processes in the universe, is time-independent.
Theuniverse becomes alive (time-dependent) only when one divides it into
anobserver and the rest of the universe. The evolution is possible only
withrespect to an observer."
Ami:
How does observation change the wave function in quantum physics? Do we
dare leave this tidbit behind when explaining the direction of evolution in
the universe? Andrei also mentions that since we have found space and time
to be interwoven, is perhaps conciousness and matter similarly woven? There
are directions to go with these questions, which science and reason can
answer. I don't know exactly how to go about this, but then, there are
things we have found which a few years ago would be impossible to test.
Thanks,
Ami Chopine