Knights of the Order
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The second law of thermodynamics says that everything on a large enough scale leads to chaos. Hot objects share their energy with colder ones, fluid substances mix, time arrow points forward. Inevitably, everything becomes dust, and nothing lives forever. Yet, some things live longer than others.
One way to fight the chaos is to shield yourself from it. Gold, for example, is one of the least chemically reactive elements, and it’s solid under standard Earthy conditions. It can last a while, and that’s part of the reason we value it. Another, much harder way to fight chaos is to embrace it: let it go through, filter it out, and build upon the accumulated order.
Life
I’ve been taught that creation of life as well as creation of intelligent life are both bifurcation points in history. That they need a number of low-probability events and conditions to fit together in order to occur, and it’s impossible to predict when exactly that can happen. But if we look at life from the point of view of the order in chaos, it starts to make a different kind of sense. Under some conditions, in some local space, matter starts to self organize. We talked about this in Theory of No Intelligence. From the mathematics point of view, if we see the physical processes as functions, then invariants emerge: properties that persist the change, survive the transformation by functions. Interestingly, these pieces of order tend to grow: once an invariant is established, it’s going to be there until the conditions are rapidly changed.
Humans have long struggled to produce a sensible definition of life. We are carbon-based life, and for all we know it’s the DNA/RNA that keeps us stable from one generation to another. How did RNA emerge and why, is still being researched. What we do know, is that complex organics compounds emerge from simpler chemical elements via a set of reactions that resemble the conditions on early Earth. Amino-acids appear to be invariants in these natural processes. Similarly, at the higher level, DNA survives through millions of years under changing conditions, by multiplying and evolving. They grow a large mechanism around them that can move, digest food, feel, and even have complex emotions and thoughts, in some species.
In that process, there wasn’t a magical switch where something dull transformed into “life”. It was just invariants all the way down. Just becoming more complex, growing infrastructure around them, to persist longer and wider.
Purpose
There we are, self-conscious, intelligent, emotional, and social creatures! Just lacking the direction on what we should do, what was the purpose of us coming here, and where we should go. We fall into all sorts of mental traps, thinking that we live for pleasure, we live for each other, we live for nothing, or even - to just find out the purpose. Nothing can really answer that “why” question. The only logical answer comes from the projection from the past, from looking at our history, at our very origins.
We emerged from mammals. We don’t know if we’ll exist centuries from now, but we have enough technical capability and organization to be able to persist through a major disaster, like a meteorite, or climate change, unlike many of our ancestors. Mammals derived from other complex multi-cellular organisms that weren’t as good at persisting. Those emerged from single-cell organisms by the means collaboration, and were able to persist more efficiently. Finally, single-cells emerged from amino-acids and DNA, which can persist through a limited set of conditions. Popping back the stack, we emerged via laws of nature that allowed us to be good at fighting entropy. We are born fighters, and our enemy is chaos.
We are the knights of the order. Our mission continues from the atoms we are made of, to bring more order to this world that otherwise turns into chaos at large. We are meant to invent new technologies that allow us to better manipulate matter, energy, and our psyche. We are mean to build, to construct things that last millenia: pyramids of Giza, Machu Picchu in the past, and maybe Dyson spheres in the future. We are meant to conquer space and time, to bend the reality in a way that lets us persist longer, and evolve.
So next time you start asking the “why” question, remember that you were born to be a knight. Born by the force of nature to bring order, and to fight chaos. We all have a mission in our blood, in the structure of our molecules, in the laws of physics that we abide to.