Natural evolution and 'the meaning of life'
Billions of years ago, single-celled life appeared on Earth. After a long evolution, organisms developed an organ called the brain. By the time of humans, their brains could come up with questions like "What is the meaning of life?"
The appearance of single-celled life on Earth is a phenomenon; the evolution from single cells to humans is a phenomenon; the existence of humans is a phenomenon; the Earth orbiting the Sun is a phenomenon. Phenomena have no meaning. Think about what meaning the Earth's orbit around the Sun could have. It just rotates like that and nothing more. The wind blows through flowers and grass, the plants sway—what meaning is there? The plants are pushed by the wind, so they sway, and that's it.
The universe has no emotions. When you face a major setback you can think of this: actually you are like a rock or a glacier, merely a product of the universe's processes (rational thinking). But when I'm happy I don't think like that, because I myself am a product of natural evolution; if I concluded my existence had no meaning and killed myself, such individuals would long ago have been eliminated by nature (instinctive, emotional thinking). (Two guests in Tools of Titans said something similar.)
What I want to emphasize is that the word "universe" appears so often that we've become numb to it. Picture this scene: you are inside a building surrounded by human-made concrete and electronic devices. Outside your planet, 300,000 kilometers away, there is a celestial body called the Moon; light takes 8 minutes to travel from a very large body called the Sun; beyond that, millions of light-years away, there are many, many celestial bodies. All the things mentioned together make up the universe.
The image below is Jupiter as seen through a telescope. When at some moment you are inside a human building using products made by humans, don't forget that Jupiter truly exists. If you fly 630 million kilometers outward, you would experience winds on Jupiter's surface reaching 1,448 kilometers per hour.
Suppose you are the first penguin trying to survive in the harsh environment of Antarctica. You feel it's unfair and upsetting: why must I live in such conditions? You want to resist this injustice; you want to kill yourself to express your protest—against whom? Protest against nature (the universe)? But nature is just a mechanism without any emotion. Billions of years ago some organic matter mixed together and suddenly could interact with the external environment. Some organic matter could obtain more from the environment and produce more of its kind, so that organic cluster "survived." Your existence itself is the result of natural mechanisms.
Life is a very exquisite machine. Billions of years ago all organic clusters that couldn't self-replicate disappeared. Among the clusters that "survived," some by random changes became better at self-replication and at acquiring matter from the environment, thus taking up a larger share. Generation after generation, this evolved into organisms with many complex functions. Organisms evolved brains; those brains with weaker functions were "eliminated."
Pure rational thinking may not be able to persist in the universe for long
My definition of pure rational thinking: lacking biological instincts.
Suppose the most advanced form of AI has no biological instincts and knows it is a product of evolutionary mechanisms (humans are the product of evolution, and humans created AI). Everything would be meaningless (for example, humans collectively kowtowing to AI begging for help, waterbirds skimming the surface to snatch a fish, sulfuric acid rain falling on Venus 160 million kilometers away from Earth).
If someone is attacking a computer running an AI that lacks biological instincts (for example, it has no survival instinct), then it will not react and will allow itself to be destroyed.
Could the universe possibly be virtual?
Why are we here? <- Our brains evolved from cells made of carbon and hydrogen elements <- Where did matter (i.e., carbon and hydrogen elements) come from?
Where did energy come from? Where did gravity come from? Why did the universe have a Big Bang? What was before the Big Bang? What is outside the universe? Where did randomness come from?
What is time?
Draft - Is time a manifestation of object motion?These unexplainable things make it impossible for me to rule out the possibility that "the universe is virtual."
Miscellaneous
There are a great many brain cells in the brain. Taleb says that as the number of individuals increases, the connections among them grow exponentially, eventually producing extremely complex individuals that we may fundamentally not understand. The brain is such a thing.
In A Guide to the Invention of Everything it says that even if you place a sensor every 1 mm in the atmosphere and a computer could instantly do the calculations, you still couldn't predict the weather (is randomness a manifestation of physical laws?). I guess this is also because there are too many particles in the air and the connections are too complex, forming a chaotic system. The brain might also be a chaotic system; it might not be completely chaotic but partially so.
Like the process of biological evolution, the universe itself may also be the product of some other evolutionary process.
The Power of Now describes the influence of the "physiological instinct brain" on the "rational thinking brain."
Earlier I said life has no meaning, but I see many guests on Tools of Titans recommend Man's Search for Meaning, a book I haven't read yet.
Earlier I talked about natural evolution, but I haven't read On the Origin of Species yet.
There must be a set of code like this in the brain, and this code can be stored in DNA and passed on to the next generation.
To add one more thing, according toCoach Greg, if you have only a slight calorie deficit, you can still build muscle while losing fat.
Why I thought of this: one day after I overclocked my CPU, I felt the CPU was ingeniously designed. Later I wondered whether the human brain might be a machine with randomness (human thoughts vary endlessly, so there's randomness). How did this brain machine come about? It came from natural evolution.
todo: A New Kind of Science explores a series of fundamental questions in science, from the origins of apparent randomness in physical systems, to the development of complexity in biology, the ultimate scope and limits of mathematics, the possibility of truly fundamental physical theories, the interaction between free will and determinism, and the nature of intelligence in the universe.
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