Had a day of thinking about the meaning of it all. Just been trying to find a Spinoza quote; failed but got this from Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

This isn't something I'm entirely comfortable writing about, because people either think you're a loony, or people who don't are loonies. But anyhoo here's what's been vexing me.

Kauffman argues in At home in the Universe that the laws of complexity can account for the emergence of life. On the mathematical boundary between chaos and order, the structures that life is built on appear. "We, the expected" - mathematics working through auto-catalytic loops.

I've also spent far too long trying to find a vaguely remembered quote from Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe ('A world made from strings. Its not science fiction. It's string theory.' What a great tag line!)

In my memory, he says that the coming together of all the branches of superstring theory into M-theory, or whatever goes beyond that, points to a final conclusion: the universe is the way it is because, mathematically, it couldn't be any other way.

Greene does spend some time wondering whether maths actually can get at the core of reality, quoting Einstein's oft-recited point about how incredible it is that we can understand as much as we can, but its a fascinating idea: that things are the way they are because they cannot, logically, be any other way. (This is tempered by his and Lee Smolin's theory that there may be a multiverse out there - and that each universe may have been born from a singularity at the centre of black holes. And that each time this happens, the fundamental constants of the universe may shift slightly: multiverse natural selection, since those capable of producing more black holes will exponentially increase.)

This is one of those things like me going on to people about the colour Red. "But how are we experiencing this? What's going on? What the fook is going on with this seeing Red thing? You can give me mechanisms until you're blue in the face, but that doesn't tell me how I'm seeing Red! Aaaaa!"

Anyway, my point: one can imagine a creationist altering their stance, and moving to intelligent design. But maybe they could then shift to a God who was capable of creating logic in such a way that life emerged from it. That would certainly be a clever-pants God.

Einstein, Hawking, and others believe in this kind of God, I think: one who set the rules of the game, let go and then spent the next billions of years sniggering from the sidelines. But what we now know about the dynamics of life - and the String Theoretic notion that implacable logic has driven everything from the birth of the universe - makes this all the more profundity-provoking.

I think creationists would be quite capable of imagining a bloke with a beard, making logic out of some eggboxes and sticky-back plastic. That's kind of the point about credulity - it doesn't encourage much in the way of deeper thought on the matter. (Well, only insofar as you have to arm yourself in argument against the infidel unbeliever.)

I'm wondering if my feelings on the matter are just as credulous. I can imagine the same thing - because I can't imagine the coincidence of a logic that has produced this world. Being entirely determined, could it equally have produced nothing? (Multiverse theory is hardly a way out of this, since it still leaves the fact that it need not have been so. "But it is." "But it needn't be..." etc...)

That's just the same reasoning as creationists. They can't imagine natural selection plus complexity could produce the order they see. I can - but only because, for me, its more plausible than the alternative explanation. Its not because I can intuitively understand how a particular kind of wasp evolved to be able to drive its food back home by sticking a control device in its brain - into precisely the right neurons - and then driving it home by steering its antennae... its just that I can see the basic principles behind evolution, and can believe that order can emerge from it.

Intelligent design folk work on this principle: chip away at what people think is plausible. Accept the larger picture of evolution, but find a solid nugget that appears to be less possible, and then cry 'I can't imagine how!'

So I'm doing the same thing: I can't imagine how the rules of the universe, right down into its dynamic, emergent bones, right into the beams that hold the whole edifice up, produces order. No - not quite right. I can see how it does it. I can see that its logical. I can't imagine that logic is accidental. Well - it isn't, of course. Its logic - just the way things are. So, what am I saying? That I can't imagine things are the way they are just because that's the way they are? Duh.

So it precisely the same in-your-face, absolutely impossible quality that perception of colour has. My colour perception - or any sensation - isn't happening 'in the dark'. There's no good reason for that. And there's no reason, really, why there should be. But, as with nature itself, it stares us in the face every day, and is totally, silently, vastly, absolutely impossible. I can look out the window now - impossible! Last night I saw the moon hanging in the sky; wherever I positioned myself, photons filled the air. Eight minutes from the sun, pummelling into me and leaving a black space behind me - a moon shadow made from sunlight. Impossible!

And, no, I don't think a guy with a beard made it all out of some egg-boxes and sticky-back plastic. But there's no getting away from the fact that I'm dumstruck by the existence of logically founded dynamic order - life, the planet Earth, photons. I mean - every single object you're seeing has a stream of photons bouncing off it, in some vast overlapping arc of light. Just move your head slightly - every object still has photons bouncing off it in that position, at the speed of light, and every other within range. Mundane, impossible.

All that really happens when I think about that, though, is that I end up thinking 'gosh, the universe is significantly cleverer than I can have any idea about' - which looks worryingly close to 'God moves in mysterious ways'.

Is that just arrogance, though: religious one-up-man-ship?

Your religious beliefs are stupid. Guy with beard? Pah! I've taken my animating principle all the way to creating logic itself, and thus have a far more profound sense of profundity than you. And I'm quite content that its an empty vast nothingness, really, when you get down to it. And I'm a liberal. So nyer.

And anyway, in what sense can the universe be clever? What on Earth am I talking about?

Going in search of the Pi quote took me to this blog on the subject, by someone else who notes that 'I have discussed these opinions with many others in the past and have always received strange looks'. He also says that 'my love for math, physics, and computer science was born when I saw this movie'. He has a nice turn of phrase:

Mathematics is the conductor in the musical that we call reality.

He goes on to say:

I believe that the universe is made of numbers. When I say ‘numbers’ I don’t necessarily mean the conventional alphanumeric system that initially comes to mind — because, as I have claimed, this was created by man. I believe that even without our current foundations of mathematics/mathematical thought, there would be some ‘underlying math’ governing the universe. The degree to which we can understand our universe, in my opinion, is directly proportional to the overall understanding of math that mankind currently has under its belt. What I’m trying to get at is this: how do we know that our understanding is complete? How do we know that there isn’t more math out there that we haven’t discovered? What if that math transcends human thought?

Went walking along the Cornish coast recently: was reminded of one way this problem has struck me before. Looking down at the mind-blowing spectacle of a mile of ocean surf pushing against the land from the cliff-top bought it back to me. That pattern isn't in the ocean itself. Each atom relates to every other separately. Oh. Er - that's not strictly true, is it? Everything in the universe is tied together in a terrifyingly incomprehensible quantum web of forces. But the coherent pattern of connected surf, and the motion itself, I can grasp. The ocean, presumably, doesn't.

In contrast, the world can have patterns that are not trivial in this way: they exist outside of anyone's perception of them. We know this, because they produce emergent order. Catalytic loops, gene expression, bird flocks, locust swarms, ants, economies, the birth and death of stars, as supernovas seed gravity wells in light-years-wide dust-regions (so I'm told): the separate parts don't know anything beyond their locality, but order appears anyway.

Just been dipping into Kant, looking for some ideas on this. Not much luck so far, except to find a reminder that this debate is as old as people reasoning:

The favoured enlightenment solution was natural theology, which exalted the order of nature, in place of revelation, as proof of God's existence, making reason the foundation of religion, since it is reason that cognises order in nature. Natural theology was not ultimately satisfactory, however, since it effectively disposed of biblical authority, and the deism which it supported (God as 'Divine Watchmaker', Supreme Technician) was too austere for the demands of a living faith. [Sebastian Gardner, Kant & the Critique of Pure Reason, p.5]

'Reason that cognises order in nature': nice. Not (necessarily) the question of God (since that's just a sticky-back-plastic n eggboxes question, in the main...)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to find a rational answer to the question 'is metaphysics possible?' - being much more than a question about God or morality, but what exists beyond our cognition, and what we can know about it.

Gardner outlines one reason why Kant can't let go of this question, even though indifference or skepticism seem the most appealing solution (e.g. who cares about the table's intrinsic nature, beyond our ability to investigate it empirically?):

What makes skepticism about metaphysics unsustainable is that metaphysics cannot be repudiated in isolation from cognition in general. Metaphysical enquiry employs the same cognitive power as is employed in commonsense and scientific judgements about the world of experience: the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgements about tables and atoms, are employed, in a purified form, in metaphysical judgements about God and the soul. The principles of metaphysics 'seem so unobjectionable that even ordinary consciousness readily accepts them'; metaphysics simply pushes them further, in search of complete explanation.

The 'perplexity' into which reason falls when it engages in metaphysical speculation is thus 'not due to any fault of its own', for it merely 'begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in the course of experience and which this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in using'. If one and the same faculty of reason is employed in empirical and metaphysical judgement, and the empirical employment of reason is legitimate, then so should be its metaphysical employment; and if metaphysics results in contradictions, then reason as a whole contradicts itself. To allow the contradictions of metaphysics to stand is therefore to allow reason to perform a reductio ad absurdum upon itself; and to repudiate metaphysics is to repudiate cognition as a rational phenomenon.

Kant's ultimate conclusion is unambiguous: we cannot say anything about objects in themselves, or indeed about noumena - objects exclusively of understanding.

Ak. Spent too long on this now, and very unlikely to reach any sensible conclusion. Nevertheless, more...

A priori reasoning gets us so far, but only so far - because of the limits and nature of our cognition. But a mind capable of building logical structures within itself in enough detail to produce emergent order might still be a priori... but its hard not to think that this act of cognition amounts to empiricism.

That's beside the point, as regards my original existential problem: whether the dynamic is produced 'out there' in the world, or 'in here', or in a computer, the underlying logical rules are the same. It can't be any other way. But I can't say anything about that. Bum.

That would be a positivist solution: shut up! Don't say anything. That might be better than my solution, which is to believe that my puny little mind ain't ever going to get a handle on the nature of reality, but that its really bloody wierd, vast and infinite, and has absolutely no bearing on the day-to-day affairs of people (insofar as you can pray as much as you like, coz no-one's manning the pray-o-meter...) Why better? Because to say anything at all is to affirm that one can say something - without needing any reason to believe one thing or the other. Which, sadly, would seem to let all the nutty insane religious types off the hook. (You know, the ones who are really, unshakeably certain about stuff.)

I think Kant and Susan Blackmore have the right idea: metaphysical speculation is entirely reasonable. In Blackmore's case, it led her from a beginning in parapsychology to finally rejecting it. I think that's a whole lot more commendable than denying reason free range over all ideas.

Still, I'm holding on to some hope that a puny human mind can get past appearances. They say that trying to reason your way to an understanding of reality is like trying to explain to someone about the wonder of the river Ganges by giving them a jar of Ganges water. Which, oddly, is what some people try and do...