While riding my bike tonight I had a thought I'll share with you...
This stream of consciousness that we call intelligence (a special case manifestation of a more basic substance: life, IMO, is tasked to sweep up inefficiency in the Cosmos. This is the beauty of life; it can organize itself into a more ordered state, at the expense of inefficiency in the Cosmos at large, and thereby creating a local decrease in entropy due to the local thermal disequilibrium.
Here's how it could work. Each available state corresponds to a variable in the endgame. Unless the endgame is deterministic, then all the upstream states must also be indeterminate. Any state that could have been must be for some period somewhere, at least at the quantum level. Why? If this is not the case, there is "something left" at absolute zero - the potential of Universes not taken as it were -like the one where I decided not to write this thought down. Think of it as something that isn't packed as dense as it could be unless all these potentialities were squeezed out of it...
The ultimate end of the Universe, either the big crunch or big fade is a universe suggested to be filled with a single quantum state, either at a singularity or at an infinitely diffuse cloud of uniform motionlessness. Can you imagine how long it will take for every quark and gluon in every atom in every corner of the Cosmos to come to thermodynamic equilibrium at absolute zero? All that absorbing and re-emitting, forming, unforming and reforming? The duration of the Universe must be immense! There would be some processes increasing entropy, some processes reducing it, but on average a increase universally until the end.
Each of "universe" could play out at various speeds (during it's duration) on into infinity. You would never know what your universe's speed setting was as a player in that universe. Your frame of reference would only be other players in your universe. I believe "life" could be the "eating" these indeterminate states (by direct manipulation of reality). Now I realize I can only posit this as a possible mechanism as a kind of thought experiment. I'd be glad to see us through darts at it and see what sticks! |
