God plays dice, and we win

 Order seems to derive from chaos, if properly disturbed... And, given infinite time, anything is possible. For example, as absurd as it may seem, the air molecules that are in your room right now and that are moving with apparent randomness, perhaps suddenly, could all move to a corner and leave you breathless. That perhaps is statistically possible, although highly unlikely. However, the same ridiculous probability seems to hold for life and, more pathetically likely, consciousness. A series of fortuitous episodes had to occur so constant in time that reproducibility on any other world is impossible. So, we come across, ladies and gentlemen, the so-called anthropic principle.

If certain absurdly probable conditions must be met in a universe to allow you and me to think, that thought is proof that they are finally met. For example, if the charge of the electrons were slightly less, they would be attracted to the atomic nuclei and the atom would collapse, preventing the existence of electromagnetism and any hint of matter. The same thing would happen by changing a tiny decimal any of the characteristics of the other systems that make up our universe. Thousands and thousands of parameters in our reality that could have a small deviation in their values and all, absolutely all, adjusted to a level of sick precision to allow life in at least one place in this universe. Smart design? Let each one think, but what allows us in practice to scratch something of the mystery of our reality is studying the mathematical probability of an infinite universe in which any emergent phenomenon such as life can occur. The most exciting thing of all is that, albeit very partially, it has been proven (article link here).

 

 

In the simulation by Schmickl T. and cols. (2016), given a soup of particles that would resemble the early universe, they repel each other so as not to collide, but they do not move too far from each other either. Very briefly, these are the two rules programmed before running the game. Until, surprisingly, the researchers observed that at some point in that small chaotic world some particles began to aggregate and increase the attractive force of other particles, growing and growing... Those structures with apparent order within the very chaos of particles that surrounded them, later began to show three states: growth, reproduction, and finally disintegration, in which the particles that composed it returned to the soup of chaotic particles, something like death. Do you remember what the definition of life was?

Although in a simplified way, since the program consisted of only two rules and our universe has infinite more, the research came to demonstrate the emerging phenomenon of life.

Our universe, given the very tight rules that it possesses, always maintained the potential of life, although to appear it had to wait until the extreme chemical complexity of the RNA world was finally available, that is, of the self-replicating molecules that emerged in the primitive land. Similarly, consciousness and intelligence could be treated as just another emergent phenomenon manifested when a certain degree of complexity builds up in the brain's processing capacity after assembling billions of neurons. On their own, they would be like those chaotic particles aimlessly obeying the laws of physics. This in turn opens up the question of artificial intelligence in a whole new way as computers become increasingly complex and the availability of information and connections between data increases in the virtual world of the Internet. Moreover, would those self-replicating units in the previously described simulation be alive? Where would they really be? I leave this reflection to you.

 

Map of the resulting multiverse after altering the only variables given by the simulation (alpha and beta angles on the horizontal and vertical axes). Thousands of alternate universes arise where, due to changes in physical laws, order and life can no longer emerge… except for in the narrow green regions.