You say that human existence doesn't need to exist. The way I understand it, necessity is a property of order. Through order, things happen because they must. Through chaos, things happen because they can. You fail to understand the concept because you still see everything from the perspective of order and you neglect the chaotic side of reality. In one sense, our existence could be interpreted as the result of meaningless accidents. Perhaps a meteorite hit the Earth carrying organic molecules, perhaps a chance bolt of lightning hit a pool of complex molecules, mistakes in genetic replication lead to phenotype changes and adaptations. All of this sounds like meaningless accidents, but that is only one side of the dynamics that are at work.Dalek Prime wrote: What is the point of existence to something that doesn't need to exist. I'm trying to gently point out it doesn't need to be. Nothing missed, nothing lost. It's not circular at all. You just don't want to see the conclusion of the reasoning, or cannot do so.
On reflection, I don't think you'll get what I'm driving at, so forget it.
Sometimes we fail to see things, not because they are not there but because they are not where we expect them to be. You fail to understand my answer because you are blinded by your own expectations.
Terrapin Station wrote:The part I emphasized there is precisely what you didn't do. What specifically in your account to you take to be a statement of how an order/chaos basis logically implies life?mysterio448 wrote:I don't understand your objection. You don't specify what it is about life that I failed to explain, or what other kind of explanation you are looking for. I explained a certain set of dynamics that is fundamental to reality itself and then I explained how the existence of life follows logically from those dynamics. What is there that I should explain?
Note that to be a logical implication, it needs to be a logically valid argument. Validity, in logic, is defined as "Impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false."
I think in order to understand why the order/chaos basis implies life, we need to better understand what life is. Life is not just one thing but is a complex set of processes and qualities; therefore it would help if we break life down into simpler parts. I mentioned some of these qualities in a previous post: "We can see this harmony between order and chaos in the delicate balance between life and death, creation and destruction, that exists in nature. The survival of some members of a population often depends on the death of others. Some species emerge while others go extinct. We can see this harmony in our very way of life: in order to maintain our own bodies we must kill, butcher and dissolve the bodies of other living beings. We can see this harmony in our own bodies: some of our hairs die and fall off as others emerge, dying skin cells are replaced by new ones, internal organ tissues are likewise in a constant state of renewal. Death and life, destruction and creation cooperate together. This is all part of the harmony/unity between order and chaos." Also, life is a far-from-equilibrium dissipative system: an organism's body is essentially condensed order which maintains that order by proliferating chaos (ie, entropy) around itself.
The point I am getting at is that when you break down what life is at its simplest level, we can see that it does follow logically from the order/chaos relationship. Life is one of many phenomena in the cosmos (along with stars, galaxies, etc.) which are essentially a reflection or echo of this order/chaos relationship.