Saturday, July 31, 2010

Everything Is Always Next


The progressive nature of the universe is self-determinate, not determinate as in the predetermined.

Causes must determine effects in a consistent fashion by virtue of our universe's laws because of the intrinsic logic that we've found these laws to represent.

Such progression is what we've come to call intelligent. In other words, it seems the universe has organized itself in ways that have allowed it to determine it own future - and to do so with predictable consistency.

And these determinations are seen as consequential in an ongoing series of immediate results which are themselves determinative in their turn. No certainty of the predeterminate will be had or needed.

It's this consistency that will give us our expected future with its elements of probability and meaning.

Because all our laws, as far as we're now able to determine, are laws of probability. Not laws from some lawgiver that actuate the certainty of some immutable and ultimately meaningless progression of obeisant commandments and unvaryingly inevitable results.

And if the universe, as logic alone must dictate, cannot have come from nothing, and shows such order and what we conceive of as design, then it can only have designed itself. And if life is part of that design, and its design continues, it would seem that life would need to be a participant in the self-designing process. And that some equivalency of life elsewhere in the cosmos always has been.