Sunday, September 16, 2007

There are no rules

I'm reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. It's taking me a long time to read because it sparks all kinds of reflections on the origin of the universe.
I think Man (or more likely Woman, Man was too busy hunting to think) came up with the idea of God as an explanation for its origin, and by extension, for the origin of the universe. The problem with this explanation is that we don't know what's responsible for God's existence. Really, it's not much of an "explanation".
But why do we assume there are explanations for everything?

Let's play a game. I give you sequences of 0 and 1, and you have to guess the rule I used to generate the sequence.

0000000000000000...
1111111111111111...
0101010101010101...
0101110111111101...

All these sequences can apparently be generated by more-or-less simple rules: "Only 0", "Only 1", "Alternate 0 and 1", "Read the sequence aloud and concatenate the result to the sequence".
But how do we know the unseen parts of these sequences (the dots) follow these rules? If I want you to lose the game, I can always add a 0 or a 1 to a sequence in such a way that your guess will turn out wrong.

Scientists look at the universe, the way you look at the sequences. They guess a rule that is consistent with the universe as observed so far, then check if the rule continues to apply. But how do we know the universe will continue to obey the rules?

The fact is that if you consider the set of all infinite sequences, there are sequences which follow rules, and sequences which do not follow rules. What's more, there are many, many, many more sequences that do not follow rules.

If we continue the analogy between universes and sequences, what are the odds we live in a universe that follows rules?

No comments: