Is Life a Random Pattern?

Pavan Kulkarni
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Have you ever had those crazy thoughts which gives you existential crisis at the fundamental level, or kind of a deep dark feeling of what the hell are humans doing in this vast universe? Or a positive liberating thought that nothing in this universe matters at all and I should live each and every moment to the fullest than constantly worrying to find a reason for this existence ? I for sure often get these thoughts and want to share it and understand if others out there in the world have similar musings.


Randomness

Everything we see around us and including us are fundamentally made up of atoms and which fundamentally are driven by quantum forces, so some random planet in a remote galaxy in our vast universe might have mountains or oceans or whatever exotic material but fundamentally are still driven by the same chemistry, physics and math. It’s like an insanely or probably extremely simple rules laid out in terms of gravity and other fundamental forces of universe which are driving these interactions between every single bit of information at the smallest level. With all this context the random musing I have is: our life as we know, the current Carbon form on this earth has been fundamentally trying to reproduce and spread some information through life as a medium. Every sentient or non-sentient (unicellular or plants) living things we know are fundamentally ingrained to reproduce and pass on the genes for the ultimate survival (may be there are a few outliers). My question is what at a very fundamental level is driving this? Fundamentally we are a pattern of information which is trying to reproduce it’s pattern and prolong the existence of this pattern to the maximum possible. But why? What is the motivation for this pattern to reproduce itself? Is the constant replication of a random pattern itself random event and our life is somehow one of those coincidences? Who is laying the rules for this pattern to sustain for eternity, this reproduction doesn’t seem to be influenced by fundamental nature of forces or is it? But there has to be either something else that we cannot comprehend or this process itself i.e. “a random pattern reproducing itself to eternity” is a random event, I am not sure why but I have an innate feeling that it’s the latter since the former needs a blind belief in a god like concept. The random theory also might be one of the reason in Fermi paradox problems on why we haven’t come across life or a sentient being in this universe. It is very hard to wrap my head around the concept that a random set of bits or information in this universe somehow wants to keep spreading it’s pattern and at a macro level fight for it’s survival to eternity.

To comprehend this concept let’s take this example. If I’m trying to simulate life in a game, I will set some base math rules which will in turn govern the physics, chemistry and biology in the simulation and will introduce few groups of patterns which all share a lot in common at the beginning. To spice up our simulation let’s introduce few more local influencing variables on the patterns to let them evolve. This once programmed and after a lot of iterations(passage of time) those initial groups of patterns might / might not be affected by the influencing variables and will be in some kind of unique state. But how would you make it self-conscious or selfish? You will have to add some kind of game logic into the system which rewards the pattern that survives till the end, and also add this awareness to those patterns so that they can learn the point of the goal in the game. After a lot of trial and error the patterns will learn that reproduction and adapting to the new induced variables will improve it’s chances to win the game.

So what we understand from this simulation is that we need a goal in the game without which I cannot understand why would a pattern do that? If these patterns did that in the simulation without us introducing a game logic then it has to be a random event !! Isn’t it? So by this logic, is our entire life a random event with no end goal? or a physical phenomenon that has something for it at the end? If it’s the latter then who decided that end goal? Was that decision itself a random event? If yes then we are back at the same problem. Arrrrghhhhh

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