9.28.2010

Bereft of Center

Where shall one point if asked where is the first cell that was "you". This line of thought helped me to understand the trite assurance by physicists that there is no center to the universe. This, because I've held the view for some time that the difficulty in finding the organic/physical boundary pursues an erroneous task due to mismatch in scale. On the scale most "organisms" are familiar with (ie Earth), there are extremely locally unique limited resources. Yet on the scale of stars within a single galaxy, we currently perceive the landscape to be relatively homogenous. This may merely imply a difference in competitive pressures which are the direct inputs to which the time throttle of evolution is adjusted. From this viewpoint, seeing as how competition on cosmic scales is much tamer, we may then begin to see why there exists only one type of body which actually appears to feed on like types: singularities. Excluding these, all other forms of change arise from (similarly gravitational) affectations upon the body's own components. Zooming all the way out one then begins to ask what would the universe appear to one able of perceiving merely energy densities per unit space (assuming space bends/shifts much slower than energy flows, space seems suited as the denominator. Tho, then again, space is only bent due to changes in energy concentration, commonly in the form of matter... Chicken and the egg? Or another false dichotomy?...)
Zooming back in we can then extrapolate from this assumption that maximizing competitive pressures on a system may serve as a variable to increase it's relative rate of evolution. Especially in the context of an evolved AI which will have to find a way to circumvent all the physics that has taken place since the first thing we would call an organism evolved from component nonorganic parts... (anticlimax: life doesn't necessarily require procreation but it seems a useful tool in the context of increasing pressures. Hopefully virtual lessons of "survival" learned from cellular automata may even be applied to our own survival, up to and inclusive of the point when an intelligence beyond my own solves the overly-accepted whole business of the dyings.)