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Universe - Simple or Complex?

#1
Zinjanthropos Offline
https://plus.maths.org/content/universe-simple-complex

Excerpt : Richard Dawkins has argued [in his book The God delusion] that adding particular additional hypotheses to explain the nature of the Universe is making its explanation more complex, and so is less useful than not adding them. His is a straightforward appeal to an idea called Occam's razor. If the data supports multiple theories equally, a simple explanation is more likely to be true than a complex one — or as Einstein wryly put "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Seriously, I'm hoping it's simple. However, not making any plans for the truth to come out shortly. 

Excerpt: Richard Swinburne's God is a simple being — it's one entity for a start whereas the Universe is made up of a billion entities — with zero limits to its power, zero limits to its knowledge and zero constraints on its freedom. This, says Swinburne, is the simplest God there could be. "It's a matter of degree between what is simple and what is complex but all things being equal you ought to believe the simplest explanation. The hypothesis I'm putting forward is that it doesn't get simpler than God." 

Yeah, like we're having an easy time with this deity. 

Don't take this seriously please.....I may not be too far off in my exploding god theory. To summarize the EGT.... God needed one more scrap of knowledge to become omniscient. That one thing he didn't know was what it was like to die. So he blew himself up one day and voila, here we are. Seems all his components carry a life force with them and bingo, his remains started living and breathing. There's also a chance God actually needed two scraps of knowledge, the other being where did he come from? But this way he can hope we life forms figure it out, something he may very well have known life would do Angel  
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#2
stryder Offline
The problem with using Occams in relationship to simplifying the universe is that if it was the case then the answer would already exist. Consider also that the sum total knowledge of Science doesn't actually come from one guy, in fact you can imply it's a string of many different "simplified" theories that all entangle together. No single person will ever have 100% of the information available to them for that matter. (Consider it a bit like the legal system, there is thousands of definitions, terms and laws within the system itself, not every single one will be known by a lawyer or judge so they will spend most of their time studying to find the most appropriate ones to fit the particular case.)

A further example would be explaining a Computer in simple terms, on the one hand you can say "It's a machine that crunches numbers" (a simple term) however to explain what it is, how it does what it does and what it is made from (The resources used and how the components work). It soon becomes a long winded in-depth explanation that can be confusing as it crosses multiple doctrines.

Then there is the factor that as humans we have a habit of trying to own everything, so the rights to a particular design need protecting. While this might be true of a new invention that can be patented, when you are talking about the universe in which we exist it would require a level of complexity to obfuscate any would be "accidental inventors" for clocking someone else's IP (Even if they end up GPLing it).
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#3
elte Offline
I wonder how can one know what is like to die if dead and can't contemplate it.  Concerning the complexity of the universe, I think a mammal's body looks much more complex by itself than the universe.  Include that in the universe, and it makes it a complex place.  These things are based on the bit of knowledge that I have about the universe. I doubt their accuracy to a large degree.
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#4
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jan 11, 2017 01:49 PM)elte Wrote: I wonder how can one know what is like to die if dead and can't contemplate it. 

The risks one has to take sometimes when in the pursuit of knowledge. I would think that not knowing what dying is like would require a death to take place.  Smile

Other people agree with you about life forms being more complex than the universe. Saw it in different articles.

Quote:The problem with using Occams in relationship to simplifying the universe is that if it was the case then the answer would already exist.

How do we know it doesn't? With trillions of planets out there, the possibility exists.

Edit: I just had a thought, maybe that's how we got here.
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#5
elte Offline
I think I know what you mean.  I  believe that God could only give afterlife, so if God died, there would be no one to supply it.  God would know that I think.

I'm amazed how complex a cell is, much more a whole mammal with a thinking brain.
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#6
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jan 11, 2017 08:16 PM)elte Wrote: I think I know what you mean.  I  believe that God could only give afterlife, so if God died, there would be no one to supply it.  God would know that I think.

I'm amazed how complex a cell is, much more a whole mammal with a thinking brain.

I guess God would have to mull over his choices. Dying would certainly give him the opportunity to experience death. I don't think we can say he's done that before.

Speaking of cells and perhaps this is another topic, but when you consider how many times cells die and get replaced over a lifetime, I have to wonder if the cells comprising an animal's body evolve during that time span.
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#7
elte Offline
What I believe about God, the experience wouldn't exist because whatever kind of brain God has would be gone at death. The brain is where consciousness and self-awareness resides.

The genes in our cells undergo gradual epigenetic changes. Cells pass the changes to their progeny, as far as I am aware of.
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#8
C C Offline
Quote:Universe - Simple or Complex?


In a way, a concept or classification like "universe" is itself the subsuming and integrating of many diverse objects and events under a simple principle. At birth what we originally encounter in sensation is a quasi-homogeneity or blurry ambiguity that we cognitively discriminate into familiar particulars as we grow older. (Beforehand, our innate behavioral responses react to it without reflective thought.) The mêlée of that resulting "many" seems arbitrary and chaotic till we finally apply a primitive rationale to it as a "cosmos", un-complicating it and turning the many back into a one (single system, container, or governing rule of how things in space are relate to each other; whatever's applicable).
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#9
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jan 11, 2017 09:07 PM)C C Wrote:
Quote:Universe - Simple or Complex?


In a way, a concept or classification like "universe" is itself the subsuming and integrating of many diverse objects and events under a simple principle. At birth what we originally encounter in sensation is a quasi-homogeneity or blurry ambiguity that we cognitively discriminate into familiar particulars as we grow older. (Beforehand, our innate behavioral responses react to it without reflective thought.) The mêlée of that resulting "many" seems arbitrary and chaotic till we finally apply a primitive rationale to it as a "cosmos", un-complicating it and turning the many back into a one (single system, container, or governing rule of how things in space are relate to each other; whatever's applicable).

The simplest method is to declare God did it. However it doesn't explain how he did it, and that IMHO makes the universe quite a complex mechanism.
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#10
Magical Realist Offline
(Jan 11, 2017 09:07 PM)C C Wrote:
Quote:Universe - Simple or Complex?


In a way, a concept or classification like "universe" is itself the subsuming and integrating of many diverse objects and events under a simple principle. At birth what we originally encounter in sensation is a quasi-homogeneity or blurry ambiguity that we cognitively discriminate into familiar particulars as we grow older. (Beforehand, our innate behavioral responses react to it without reflective thought.) The mêlée of that resulting "many" seems arbitrary and chaotic till we finally apply a primitive rationale to it as a "cosmos", un-complicating it and turning the many back into a one (single system, container, or governing rule of how things in space are relate to each other; whatever's applicable).

Seen like that, the universe---as in "one thing"--is a vast simplification of our own experience. The array of images and patterns and qualia that assaults our senses at every moment all gets subsumed under a concept of commonality---of a common spacetime and a common substance called matter. Its funny though when I think universe I usually don't think buildings and cans of soup and TV commercials and books. I usually think stars and galaxies and black holes. But the universe begins at the tip of our nose, hitting us as the smell of bacon wafting thru sunlit air when we awake in the morning. It is a living, shifting and ever surprising montage of patterns and events falling in place upon this simplifying conceptual template we can with a mere thought roughly impose over it.

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."-- John Muir
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