Unmaking Sense

Once we are alerted to the possibility that the patterns, laws and trends we observe in the world may arise spontaneously, we can be more circumspect about attributing things to conspiracies. They may just arise as the spurious patterns that are inevitable in any large samples. Ramsey Theory again. But so may the successes we observe be attributable to serendipity rather than talent, skill or anything that makes their authors worthy of praise.

What we are prepared to think true and to believe, even what we think truth to be, when divorced from experiments in life and what it is best to believe in their interests, becomes all-too-easily no more than a means of determining whether we are loyal members of a tribe whose beliefs are arbitrary, mere indications of whether members are “sound”. Those who fail the test are variously ostracised, persecuted or, in extreme cases, burnt at the stake.

We tend to assume that we have problems that need to be solved but much less frequently to assume that we misunderstand which problems need to be solved. One such problem is the question of truth, which is not perhaps what we think it is, and cannot be what we think it is, but nevertheless controls the criteria we use to evaluate the solutions to the problems we have even though they are the wrong problems. Truth sets the wrong criteria for the solution of the wrong problems.

The majority of the factors affecting the trajectory of the world are invisible, so our estimates of what we like to call cause and effect are at best approximate guesses.

Ramsey theory says that any sufficiently extensive system must inevitably exhibit some kind of order. That means that when we look at the world will be likely to find order in it even if there has never been any conscious deliberate intention to put it there. We explore some of the implications of this view and we challenge one of the inferences that some make to the effect that there can therefore be no such thing as pure randomness.

There is a big difference between accepting some degree of inequality and even exploitation as inescapable because the world cannot exist in a completely equal state permanently, but that is not the same as saying that we aim for inequality or knowingly allow exploitation. We should rather strive for as little inequality and as little injustice and as little exploitation as possible in a world in flux.

There is more than a sense in which anarchism even interpreted with the very best of intentions seems to present us with insuperable difficulties when we consider the possibility that groups, individuals or even whole nations might take advantage of it in order to come and “steal our stuff”. Can anything be done about this? What are the minimal levels of leadership and order, of power and social hierarchy necessary to sustain a society?

Can we even conceive of the universe as if it operates according to no principles at all other than that what we might metaphorically call that its next state is accessible from where it is now? This kind of pure randomness is something human minds find almost impossible to think their way through. Yet it may hold the key to everything.

The idea that there are processes that are either computable irreducible or just plain irreducible, that go merrily along their way despite the absence of some underlying principle that decides how they behave, is much harder to appreciate than we might at first sight think. If the universe is really purely random and not governed by any intrinsic underlying laws that we might get some sort of intellectual handle on by formulating those laws, what kind of being does it have that carries on doing what it’s doing despite the fact that there is no underlying law and no underlying set of principles governing that behaviour? Is such a notion even intelligible? Probably not. But that’s my point: perhaps the only intelligible thing about the universe is that it is unintelligible; and not only to we poor finite humans, but to anything at all including the Vogons.

We talk about “using” energy but nobody can “use” energy. What we mean is that we degrade usable energy into less usable forms of energy. That increases the disorder in the universe which we measure using the physical concept of entropy. Our bodies are in effect machines designed to extract and create significant order, order that is which is significant for at least us if not the Vogons, from the available order around us in the universe. How we do that is one of the great mysteries of life. That we do it is undeniable. And so in extracting by separation significant order from the universe albeit at the expense of a net increase in the disorder of the universe, we create significant meaning from inside a system absolutely indifferent to what we are doing. Never forget the Vogons.