by cess11 | 2025-04-14 13:04:04+00:00
"In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function."

Sounds like they're struggling to accept that the cosmos is not conscious and it doesn't design, and possibly confuse the fantasies we construct to, as it might be phenomenologically put, make sense of our environment, with the environment itself.

In ancient abrahamic cosmology it was proposed that the cosmos was designed, and first it was stone and water and so on, and then the biological matter was put in there, segmenting stone, hippopotamus and human into a kind of cosmological hierarchy of ethical and divine importance. Famous ancient greek philosophers imagined that there was another world shaping ours, geometrically purer and to people with a particular taste perceived as obviously more beautiful and holy.

Different strains of similar thinking survived in parts of the world for a long time, and had a renaissance due to european colonialism spreading it with a diverse set of tools.

One of the strongest views that followed is a cosmological dualism, the belief that there is something like soul or mind that is different from matter, usually paired with the belief that this is how truth enters the world and that truth is otherworldly, etherical.

Modern physics turned out to be absolutely brutal towards ideas like these. For a hundred years experiment upon experiment just smashed such segmentations and expectations against a growing mountain of experiential evidence. As of yet we have no evidence of the cosmos being governed by laws and selection, it just is what it is and the supposed laws are human interpretations, hopes and fantasies.

Protestant christianity is in an especially bad place due to this development, since it bets all it has on mental phenomena being more real than matter. Catholics and muslims can fall back on arguing that the divine is unknowable and that the effects of certain acts and traditions are socially beneficial, which sometimes puts them at odds with or makes them absolutely incompatible with worldly regimes of power. Protestant ideology on the other hand, can be fitted in with basically any regime, material conditions just aren't that important, ethically or otherwise.

Looking at the micro-perspectives we didn't find geometrical simplicity, instead we found weird, messy fields and almost-existences, putting all sorts of expectations about the foundations of the cosmos into question. Maybe it'll change, but at the moment there's no evidence for some grand principle or cosmic selector or whatever. One might argue something here about cosmic constants or the symmetry Dirac sussed out but that's still just pushing human experience into an algebra.

The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock. The argument that 'DNA encodes more information' is childish, there are repetitive structures everywhere, like in the crystalline structures in a piece of rock. Protein sacks carrying their own emulation of a particular old ocean on a particular planet and flubbing around on land, carefully putting in salts and carbon and so on to keep it going, is neither more or less complex, neither more or less "information dense" in itself, than a photovoltaic panel pushing electrons to light up a screen.

There is a good book from the nineties on this topic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Cert.... One should be very suspicious of people that talk about being cosmically selected, or about natural laws.