One thing common to most of the humanity, is the acceptance of Religion. I cant really say whether i am a devout religious man, but i guess i believe. I would put myself in Spiritual category so to say. But still the concept of God eluded me, until i read it somewhere.
I had this question of how to understand god in currently established frameworks and i got the answer in the book called “Shantaram” by Gregory David Roberts. It is in a sense a account of his life, his escape from prison in Australia and the the entanglement with the mafia in Mumbai ( India ). It was in one of his meeting with the top boss of Mafia, a guy called Abdel Kader Khan in the book, that AKK tells him a philosophy.
It is sometimes referred to as Tendency towards Complexity theory. What it essentially means is that to try to understand everything, we need to look in the past. Just after the big bang, there were no atoms even, only a mixture of mass. Then neutrons, protons etc formed . Next came atoms and elements. These elements formed stars which collapsed and gave rise to heavier element. Even in history of earth , things have continued to become more complex gradually, something we also call evolution. Well perhaps it is the order of nature to move in more complex direction. And thus, there has to be an end point. The thing with Ultimate Complexity. It can be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscience. This Ultimate Complex thing can be called God.
It also gives a very short and precise answer to the question, as to how to differentiate between good and the bad. It says, anything that helps us move towards God or rather in more complex direction can be termed as Good, and anything opposing this flow of motion can be called bad.
These words are imprinted on my life, until i find a better answer. Somehow it gives me a sense of calmness to know i can understand god, and i can find what good i am doing in my life.
How do you reconcile the tendency towards complexity theory with the second law of thermodynamics. Heat death is the opposite of complexity it is the ultimate simplicity.
Just read Shantaram and did not agree with Kahn’s ultimate complexity argument, because of not being able to reverse entropy. I see “query” above invoked the second law of thermodynamics, which is kind of the same thing I was looking to say. Here’s what I would have liked Lin to say to counter Kahn’s ultimate complexity/god theory but also give him hope that god could in fact be the ultimate simplicity… ie nothing.
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in the 1950’s called “The Last Question.” The story opens in 2061 with the Earth cooling down. Scientists ask the giant computer, “can entropy be reversed?” and the computer answers “not enough data for a meaningful answer.” In the next scene, earth’s inhabitants have fled the white dwarf that used to be our sun, for younger stars; and as the galaxy continues to cool, they ask the miniaturized supercomputer, which contains all of human knowledge, “can entropy be reversed.” It answers “not enough data.” This continues through more scenes, with the computer even more powerful and the cosmos even colder. The answer, however, remains the same. Ultimately trillions of years pass, and all life and warmth in the Universe have fled. All knowledge is compacted into a wisp of matter in the near-absolute zero of hyperspace. The wisp asks itself “can entropy be reversed?”
“Let there be light,” it responds. And there was light.
Thanks to http://edge.org/q2007/q07_3.html who summarised the story here and enlightened me to irreversible entropy.
Also Kahn’s idea that everything is alive, but cats are more complex arrangements of atoms than rocks, so we see the life in them is
But when Khan was asked “what’s good & what’s bad? And right or wrong?” His reply was “ask yourself, what would the world be like if everyone did it?” that was the section of the discourse that jumped out to me, man’s laws change as time goes by & civilization evolves, the laws of nature seem to stay balanced with an ultimate aim for the greater good,
Hello, I came across your blog while searching about the tendency toward complexity. I studied philosophy in college and have been an atheist since. Shantaram and, more specifically, The Mountain Shadow have me questioning my deeply held nonbeliefs of 15+ years. If you haven’t read the second book, The Mountain Shadow, I highly recommend it. At first it seems like it was hastily written in compassion to Shantaram, and I wasn’t sure if I would finish it, but about half way into it, he starts discussions with Khan’s teacher and the philosophies are much more profound. I see GDR has published an ebook about his 6 year spiritual journey recently, I am now looking forward to reading that one and wondering if I will find some semblance of faith. If you have any other recommendations for similar books, please let me know! Cheers.
I loved the book but don’t agree with Abdel Kader Khan’s philosophy.
First of all I don’t think that it’s an accepted scientific fact that the universe is tending towards ever increasing complexity. We don’t know enough about the universe to state this as a fact. The universe may reach a certain level of complexity, then as stars die, life expires, black holes consume, and heat diminishes the universe may stop becoming more complex. On the other hand, if you believe that the universe collapses in a “big crunch,” then it returns to its primal simplicity.
Secondly, how does this relate to good and evil? I can understand the argument that thwarting God’s purpose (more complexity) is evil and promoting this is good, but I cannot understand how you can know in many cases whether an act by a human will increase or decrease universal complexity. Moreover, any definition of what promotes or retards complexity is just as elusive as a definition of good or evil.
Kahn’s philosophy fails.
Thank you for your thoughts Pranay.
Several readers of your blog find fault with Abdel Kader Khan’s philosophy because the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that systems eventually move towards less complexity. That only an outside source of energy can create a system like our earth which gets energy from the our sun.
In lay terms “One simple statement of the law is that heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects (or “downhill”), unless energy in some form is supplied to reverse the direction of heat flow.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
I definitely am not qualified to have a strong opinion on this subject, but I believe that the laws of thermodynamics are talking about closed systems, otherwise, there is no way to understand where the limitations are for measurement (open systems are by definition open). There are no closed systems in our universe except maybe the universe itself is closed, but I think that gets outside of the realm of observable phenomena.
So, I think that Abdel Kader Khan’s philosophy may be probable but not provable or disprovable.
Without doing very much research, I found two books that seem add some support to Abdel Kader Khan’s philosophy (besides my naive argument above).
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Entropy and complexity: the surprising paradox behind our universe by Sean B. Carroll
“One of the many big ideas in physicist Sean B. Carroll’s The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself is the concept that entropy can drive increasing complexity. In fact if our universe did not have increasing entropy as one of its fundamental components, we would not have the complex world we see today, including you and me.”
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The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time BOOK: by Julian Barbour
“Point, physicist Julian Barbour argues that the second law has been misapplied and that the growth of order determines how we experience time. In his view, the big bang becomes the “Janus point,” a moment of minimal order from which time could flow, and order increase, in two directions. The Janus Point has remarkable implications: while most physicists predict that the universe will become mired in disorder, Barbour sees the possibility that order – the stuff of life – can grow without bound.”