My apologies… This is what happens when I get away from the local tourists, construction projects and smoke by taking a several-day solo ride to the California coast.

At the time I was in college, “chaos theory”, or more accurately “chaotic complex non-linear dynamic systems”, was a popular meme (and area of study). This particular field of descriptive mathematics was largely the brainchild of Edward Norton Lorenz, a meteorologist and mathematician who coined the terms “butterfly effect” and “strange attractor”.  Seeking a better mathematical description of atmospheric events for use in weather forecasting, Lorenz came to the conclusion that weather reflects a type of system that is both non-linear (that reacts at rates inconsistent with changes in inputs), and that is just too complexly interacting to appear deterministic to a human observer.

Lorenz, however, didn’t believe that weather patterns are not deterministic. Instead, he considered that they are simply an example of phenomena that, given extraordinarily small differences in initial condition, can magnify change over time enough to cause wildly differing results.  Or as he wrote, “Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states…”

This makes an exact mathematical predictor for such events humanly impracticable, causing things to appear “chaotic”. But Lorenz was able to derive that generalized patterns in such systems often can be discerned over time, and that they will follow approximate paths around mathematical regions that he termed, “strange attractors”.

Chaos theory is, nevertheless, a powerful descriptor of far more than just the “complexity” found in weather patterns. It can also describe any system where change through interaction is amplified greatly over time, from CO₂ accumulating in the atmosphere (climate change) or a powerline singing in the wind (vortex street), to a hinged pendulum (coupled oscillator), or the tumbling of a tennis racket hurled along its intermediate axis (frustrated amateur). But when modeling such systems (at least in theoretical mathematics classes), there’s always an idealized assumption that energy is either perfectly conserved, or that it continues to be introduced in an amount appropriate to a system remaining in some overall pattern.

But natural phenomena aren’t idealized systems.

Storms, like Roulette-wheels or flying tennis rackets, aren’t self-sustaining patterns because they don’t have any apparatus for actively re-introducing a balance of energy necessary to maintain themselves, perhaps not even long enough for an observer to give up watching before some discernible pattern emerges. They wind down (or up, perhaps) until reaching some “tipping-point” where the pattern changes entirely, or where it’s simply overwhelmed by its surroundings.

Life, however, does have access to such systems.

Regardless, to the extent that energy remains available, life might be viewed as but a more complex “storm”, just one with a more privileged, longer-lasting access to energy – a “thermodynamically open” system that stays in motion long enough for some more interesting patterns to emerge, including further improvements in access to energy. Consequently, that the progression of life appears to be in part unpredictable while its general patterns do exist long enough to be discernible neither exempt it from the laws of nature or of mathematics — nor implies a privilege over deterministic processes.

The fundamental distinction upon which the teleological argument, or the argument that life is driven by “purpose”, generally rests is upon the conservation of an interpretable form of information through a replicable pattern.  In effect, the “selfish” gene or the “striving” to maintain life itself drives the process.  However, I’d argue that this is simply a matter of using semantics and flawed analogy to put the cart before the horse.

All of the patterns of the universe to which humans apply definitions are simply extensions of a specific set of basic rules that are built-into the operation of the universe directly as the “laws-of-physics” — nature’s sieve-of-order.  Physicists call these innate characteristics of universal order things like, “ħ,” “G,” “c,” “field-coupling constants,” “least action,” “spin”…  And through these interactions, the universe conserves a record of its states in time.

Higher-order systems simply emerge from interactions (or “couplings”) as described by these constants, and in increasingly complex ways – “enthalpy,” electron pairing, atomic structure, magnetic alignments, surface tension, crystals, exothermic reactions, chemical oscillators…nuclear fusion. So it seems reasonable that eventually something that will manifest more complex, self-reinforcing and replicable patterns, such as RNA or DNA, should emerge.

Moreover, these constructively-interpreted chemical patterns don’t represent exclusive limits to self-replicating information.  Order is a characteristic of information in general, and not merely of chemistry as a particular manifestation.  So any form of repeated communication, such as that within or between organisms, human intellect, and technology also amount to means for the preservation of information.  Moreover, these forms too will naturally-select through the expressions of their own forms of “alleles” or “mutations” into patterns that are better able to maintain self-sustaining balances of energy.

Consequently, the teleological argument appears superfluous to life’s enduring patterns. Observations of nature instead suggests that they are a result of entirely fixed processes, evolving through exchanges regulated by the most basic, underlying patterns or “rules” of the universe – perhaps inevitably. And I see no indication that life is exempt from any of these rules, or that it can somehow avoid an inevitable thermodynamic winding-down. Even the observable universe in its entirety apparently loses energy over time.  Everything, eventually succumbs to entropy.  Even life.

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From a mathematical perspective, the interactive scattering and entanglement of energy within our universe corresponds to a transition from an initial condition of little information into a highly complex state that increasingly defies mathematical compression.  It’s analogous to highly-interactive software resolving itself according to the fixed rules of a computer.  This is, in fact, the source our human perception of the “arrow-of-time”.  We can’t possibly know of a “future” for which we have an insufficient capacity to hold its information.  But this doesn’t mean that the future is not fixed, only that it’s unknowable.

Einstein once remarked to his assistant, Ernst Straus, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”  Einstein wasn’t referring to the “God” of a religion, but to the mechanisms of a comprehensible cosmos.  And therein, his own descriptions shed some light, though perhaps disconcerting to some in what it revealed.

“Special relativity,” as well as quantum characteristic of “entanglement”, and the arbitrary nature of time in “Quantum Electro-Dynamics” (QED), all imply that we exist within a fixed “block universe.”  That every event or interaction throughout all of time is set firmly into a sort of holographic still-photo of an exhaustive quantum computation resolves virtually every paradox of physics.  But the trade-off is that the sacred cow of free-will disappears into a vapor of information, swirling through a maze of strange attractors that mark the patterns of an immensely complex, but utterly unalterable existence.