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Life creates order
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
You may have heard that impermanence creates suffering. That because of the nature of continuous change, we find that that which we wish for is taken away from us, and that which we wish not to have is given to us.
But what also happens is life creates order, and things fitting together, and life also maintains organisms. So in a way life keeps suffering at bay, until it becomes old and can no longer fulfil its function.
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Order often gets a bad rap because of the harmful ways it can express itself socially. But order is also taking the randomness of nature and turning it into food crops that feed us. Or harnessing the wind for a sail or electric power.
Most of the universe moves in ways that don't promote life. But in the extremely rare set of conditions where life has arisen life itself has the ability to maintain and sustain itself.
I don't think impermanence makes us suffer. Our wanting things to be different makes us suffer. Impermanence is what gives us life and the possibility of awakening.
Does life create order or does order create life?
A completely chaotic universe is a dead universe. A completely ordered universe is a dead universe.
I think chaos is order misunderstood as all things have a cause.
I iz dead and don't exist? I knew it!
In between death and a lot of emptiness (not that it can be measured) there is a something. Iz it me, mechanics of the quantum type … or just …
So you should view this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/monkeymind/2018/03/like-a-bubble-in-a-stream-a-zen-teacher-offers-a-paraphrase-of-the-diamond-sutra.html
The order of physics and geological processes is not order on a more macro scale. Life replicates itself, it creates structures like a beehive or a birds nest. It creates more of itself, a few penguins will create a colony of penguins who huddle together against the cold.
I suppose both at some level. I would phrase it as order creates and sustains life and life creates and maintains order.
I think we're talking about degrees here. The level of order and chaos matters.
Are these beings actually creating order though or are they following natural order as instinct?
Perhaps life and order are also different ways to see the same thing.
What came first, the tool or the art?
I think chaos is when things appear random, not when they are random. Everything still depends on conditions even if we lack the ability to trace the effects from all causes.
Chaos and order are two ways to see the same information but in the absolute sense there is no opposition. Just complimentary aspects of the same process.
Brief: Indeed, life creates order for life is orderly chaos.
One might say that life is chaos channeled so as to appear orderly.
Life is what makes sense and purpose of the chaos.
Embrace the chaos, it is a function of life as life is a function of chaos.
Beautiful either way.
Peace to all
Life’s ability to sustain itself and temporarily hold impermanence at bay is far more interesting than order vs chaos, in my mind.
Without entropy seeds would have to painstakingly placed where they are to sprout rather than just distribute far and wide by wind or by other entropic process.
I sometimes ponder if identity is just another name for negentropy or the conscious obscuration of entropy.
Is it not the vibratory energy of existence that allows life to arise where ever conditions are conducive enough to allow for it, just as the eventual decline of that vibratory energy brings about conditions that will no longer allow life to exist.
While we might anthropomorphically marvel at the tenacity of life here on earth, its infinitesimally small representation, when compared to the rest of existence, clearly says something else.
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@jeroen.... So in a way life keeps suffering at bay, until it becomes old and can no longer fulfil its function........
only if one thinks that attachments, birth, disease & death are not part of the equation.
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Yes, but these are part of the package, you get them included automatically. Its still to your benefit to receive the gift called ’life’.
I'm not sure what you mean. Impermanence is never held at bay and life depends on it. It could be you're equating impermanence to suffering but it is our aversion to impermanence that makes us suffer.
Life may recognize order, harmonize with order and/or use order to create but I don't think life creates order. Order being simply the way things go.
Well consider a lifeless world such as the moon — cratered with random-seeming debris from impacts, chaos at work. Then look at the Earth, large parts of it covered with grasslands and forests, teeming with life feeding on other life, creating structures and patterns in various places. Some even visible from space, like the Great Barrier Reef.
The conditions were right for life as we know it to grow on Earth. The conditions on the moon are not ripe for life, however, not long ago, China did plant cotton on the moon and it grew two leafs before dying after two weeks. Order still dictates on the moon. If the conditions are right, stuff happens and if not we stay hidden.
The zen story about the cup of tea comes to mind…
Orderly chaos sounds like a contradiction. Maybe I misunderstand your meaning.
But that's order and even suggests a programmer with an agenda.
Chaos is not chaos if it follows a path toward sense or purpose.
I can get behind the idea of embracing uncertainty but embracing chaos seems like embracing ignorance for chaos is just order yet to be understood.
From the standpoint of physics and the uncertainty principle, life creates more disorder (entropy) than it does order. For example, the energy via heat given off of the human body (adding entropy) is greater than the order created by memorizing these words. Assuming our universe is effectively a closed system and the laws of physics are uniform, which seems to be the case observationally speaking, the arrow of time we experience going towards the "future" corresponds to the arrow of entrophy increasing (as it cannot increase) per the second law of thermodynamics. Something to think about.
@Jason_
Life is indeed chaos. As we look around us, as we observe the environment, we indeed see chaos. Yet, out of that chaos emerges order, patterns. As a single drop if rain falls from the cloud, we can not predict specifically where it will land.Yet, when combined with the countless other drops of rain, we can accurately track and predict the rainfall. It is an example of chaos and order. In our lives, we take in all the countless micro bits of utter chaos and blend them into at least a perceived order. We perceive and operate in the macro. We do not see the chaos for we see or at least a pattern emanating from that chaos. Thus, from our perspective, we perceive order in the chaos, we have orderly chaos. Life is a wondrous hodgepodge, chaotic, painful and beautiful. And in our strange chaos, we are the order, we are the glorious pattern. We are the manifestation of the greatest enigma.
Peace to all
I think this is what is important in the discussion. On a cosmic scale entropy is always increasing. Its this small pocket of life on Earth that seems to maintain enough order to make use of matter. Just a small eddy in the flow of the universe.
As we know 'emptiness is form and form is emptiness'. Which the pattern forming mind cannot conceive or think about objectively, or comprehend.
It will be a while after hybrid human/machine interfacing/augmentation that we can start developing 'models' that allude/approach ideas beyond present options.
In this sense we try to comprehend the limitlessness or grasp infinity, only to find a relaxing into our dissolving.
To put it another way,
what is on the other-side? A chicken? But no-road?
I agree with much of your POV. It is very poetic and I'm sympathetic to it from our human POV. However, re: "Yet, out of that chaos emerges order, patterns," as far as the physics of our universe operates, life creates more chaos and less order. We're just good at seeing patterns. But entropy does not decrease over time. Which for me is mind-boggling because we perceive so much order (our lives, galaxies, etc.). But all of this perceived order belies increased chaos and uncertainty, so much so that we can only speak of probabilities and not absolute certainties.
I’m not convinced of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases. It may be so in certain classes of situations, but I’ve never seen a global, all-encompassing proof of it, and until there is a proof, in my eyes it remains a theorem.
Technically, no theory can be proved. But as Stephen Hawking puts it, "if a theory is mathematically consistent and always gives predictions that agree with observations, we can be reasonably confident it's the right one." And this is the case of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. So I guess you may never be satisfied, but there's reasonable confidence this is how our universe works and nothing has yet to contradict it.
Found an interesting newish hypothesis on the relationship between life and entropy.
Don't think I really understood it, but what I gather is that life keeps its own entropy low (maintains order) by increasing entropy outside itself. Maybe in some sense that's how all ordered systems maintain themselves?
As soon as something tangible, or an idea arises it's already on the road to change/ and impermanence, cessation has already begun; recognising this surely frees us from the suffering caused by attachment.
What would it mean for the 2nd law of thermodynamics if this space/time expansion is not the whole of the universe? There could be an infinite amount of space/time bubbles in the all inclusive universe. This space/time bubble may not even be a closed system but an open system within a larger closed system.
I'm not even sure a completely closed system makes any real sense.
Sort of how "all is one" falls short of implying all-inclusivity by positing a border or finished product, an inside and an outside of the all inclusive set makes no real sense. Even as an inside and outside of this one space/time expansion does make sense as per the 1st law of thermodynamics and whatever was here before the big bang to make it go.