The Notion Of The Universe 'Knowing', 'Predicting' And 'Computing' Its Own Behaviour Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 35, 36):

We stress that this [the unpredictability of chaotic systems] is not just a human limitation. The Universe itself cannot 'know' its own workings with absolute precision, and therefore cannot 'predict' what will happen next, in every detail. Some things really are random. … deterministic chaos seems random because we are necessarily ignorant of the ultra-fine detail of just a few degrees of freedom, and so is the Universe itself. …

Those systems that are chaotic have severely limited predictability, and even one such system would rapidly exhaust the capacity of the entire Universe to compute its behaviour. It seems, then, that the Universe is incapable of computing the future behaviour of even a small part of itself, let alone all of itself. Expressed more dramatically, the Universe is its own fastest simulator.

This is surely a profound conclusion. It means that, even accepting a strictly deterministic account of nature, the future states of the Universe are in some sense 'open'. Some people have seized on this openness to argue for the reality of human free will. Others claim that it bestows upon nature an element of creativity, an ability to bring forth that which is genuinely new, something not already implicit in earlier states of the Universe.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the notion that the Universe 'knows', 'predicts' and 'computes' its own behaviour, independently of the semiosis of humans, is a metaphor derived from the transcendent view of meaning: that meaning transcends semiotic systems and the aim of science is to match that meaning with theory. This view is invalidated by the finding of Quantum Physics that, in Wheeler's words, a phenomenon is not a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon; that is, that meaning is immanent: a property of semiotic systems only.

The proposition that the future is 'open' is distinct from the proposal of free will. The proposition involves modalisation (probability and usuality), whereas the proposal involves modulation (inclination and obligation).